The Safety Valve: Why Local News Matters in an Age of Super-Intelligence

On Friday evening, October 16, 2026, in beautiful Rappahannock County, the Foothills Forum held its annual meeting.

The  Foothills Forum is  an independent, nonprofit journalism organization founded in 2014 in Rappahannock County, Virginia. It produces fact-based, nonpartisan reporting on local issues, working in partnership with the weekly Rappahannock News. Its distinctive model strengthens an existing community newspaper rather than replacing it, helping sustain in-depth journalism in rural Virginia.

Their important mission is to keep local journalism and community reporting alive at a time of great uncertainty about how all Americans get local news that directly affects their lives and well-being.

According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the United States lost nearly 40% of its local newspapers over the two decades leading up to 2025.

Medill’s October 2026 report says another 170 newspapers closed or merged over the past year. There are now 238 U.S. counties classified as local news deserts, with no locally based source of reliable local news.

The Forum’s guest speaker was the highly respected journalist Dana Milbank, a county resident who is taking a new step in his distinguished career by moving to a new venture, The Washington Sun, as he explains:

“Until now, I had spent my entire career in the legacy media: eight years at The Wall Street Journal, two at The New Republic, 26 at The Washington Post. Much of that time was a period of managed decline, shrinking budgets, shuttered bureaus, reduced coverage and round after round of buyouts and layoffs.”

The format was simple: two chairs on a stage, once a basketball court, at The Black Twig, a local restaurant in a former school, for a Q&A between Dana and Andy Alexander, the Forum’s chairman.

Theirs was an insightful discussion, looking forward, with lessons applicable across America and, in fact, the entire globe, because the internet has changed how people get news. Many readers now use social media, websites, podcasts, and news apps instead of buying a newspaper. Consequently, advertising revenues have declined. Now add the Super-Intelligence (SI) revolution, both good and bad, and the future of how people get and internalize information becomes an important dynamic, little understood to date.

Will SI isolate the individual by removing human interaction in local communities, often previously expressed in the court of public opinion as “did you see what was reported today?”

Or can SI go in a productive direction, with wider and faster distribution of significant, fact-based news?

After all, SI is only as accurate as its data, hence the challenge: no local news reported, no data to pirate.

This brave new world is a real challenge.

My guess is probably both directions concurrently. People go inward, but they also always feel an imperative for human interaction about the quality of their lives in the community where they live.

We shall see.

One of the most profound insights from the Q&A was Dana’s point that in this time of significant societal stress a local newspaper is essentially, in my words, a much-needed safety valve.

Local fact-based news is a very important societal safety valve, so that the hyper-heated, angry steam in our national engine, which is traumatizing America across a huge political divide, does not blow up the engine that is the American way of life.

It is that serious.

Setting aside all the current deadly and horrific problems in the Middle East, one can look back at a past model: how the Ottoman Empire, with central control, used local courts to keep its vast empire functioning for 600 years.

A very learned Middle East Rappahannock County resident is Christine van den Toorn an American specialist in Iraqi affairs and higher education. She has worked in Iraq since 2009 and previously taught Middle East history at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. She is a nonresident senior fellow with the Iraq Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. She is also the founder and director of Baghdad Business School.

After an insightful  lecture about her Iraq work  in a beautiful Rappahannock Library Building, she told me privately how the Ottoman Empire, which she had studied in great detail,  ruled such a contentious tribal empire of warring factions for so long. Ruling from Constantinople, now Istanbul Turkey, they established a local court system for dispute resolution. People could bring complaints against officials and document transactions. Such a decentralized trusted system could resolve disputes locally which helped different communities manage everyday affairs inside the wider imperial framework.

The key take away separated by time and geography but united by a common thread of local empowerment is that the Ottoman Courts provided a safety net for resolving disputes and local newspapers provide information and public scrutiny.

They are complementary rather than identical.

However, a much deeper lesson is that a large political system cannot function through central authority alone.

It must have local institutions that give people comfort that there is fairness and public justice in their lives.

Of course, as with a court finding, and Christine mentioned that everything presented was written down, in newspaper reporting you always win some and lose some.

The American sense of fair play understands that point completely.

Open, transparent, accurate local news, which Dana championed, may greatly help build community and, hopefully, statewide and nationwide trust in our Constitutional republic: trust that information is fair and can be relied on, and that all are empowered and can have a voice.

On a fall evening in Rappahannock County, Va., such an effort was discussed.