As you move out of urban and suburban areas, it seems like it gets harder and harder to make news matter. In exurban and rural areas, there's not really going

As you move out of urban and suburban areas, it seems like it gets harder and harder to make news matter. In exurban and rural areas, there's not really going to be a lot of news within the (geographic) area people care about. It's too fragmented. For instance, the fight between the mayor two-towns-over and the county government isn't really of interest to the rest of the county most of the time. I don't care about a murder that happened 30 miles away. News generation is probably a function of population density - in less dense areas, there's not a lot going on that needs to be reported on, so to fill even 4-6 newspaper pages, you've got to cover hundreds of square miles, and so each article isn't "local" for a large percentage of the population.