‘Too much information’ is a phrase you often hear, usually aimed at a friend or colleague broadcasting too much about their private life. In fact, we live in an age of constant information churn: advertisements, television, radio, social media. Messages, messages, until it’s hard to sort good from bad, true from false. Increasingly, however, when it comes to local news coverage, ‘too little information’ is the watchword.

Not all communities in the UK are so fortunate as York when it comes to a daily local paper, available both in print and online. Love or loathe The Press (and we very much hope for the former) I believe all York’s citizens should be grateful it still exists.

According to the BBC, since 2005 more than 200 local papers have closed in the UK and the number of regional journalists has halved to around 6,500, with staff cuts, centralised newsrooms, sub-editing and printers re-located miles from local communities, leaving press benches in councils and courtrooms empty.

An estimated 58 per cent of the country has no daily or regional title and rural areas are increasingly reliant on London-based media and their own social networks for local news. The inevitable result is a skewing of how our already divided country perceives itself, with ‘left-behind’ communities, often in former industrial areas, feeling more marginalised and ignored than ever.

The gradual decline in the number of local newspapers should be a matter of concern for anyone who believes in democracy. Political decisions taken at a national level are almost always enacted in local communities. Even region-spanning projects like HS2 can be judged by their local impacts.

Just as crucially, it becomes very hard to hold local decision-makers to account. Take, for example, the upcoming York Central development. This huge infrastructure project has the potential to make or mar a large area of the city centre for generations to come. While we citizens will certainly be given access to online information by developers, laypeople will want to read informed summaries of the proposals and counter-proposals, as well as analysis of the on-going debates. Without vibrant, well-resourced local journalism, that kind of scrutiny will be hard to find.

Interestingly, local papers are far more trusted than their national counterparts. According to recent research by the European Broadcasting Union, Britons rank the reliability of national newspapers as the lowest of the 33 nations surveyed.

By contrast, a 2016 report by Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at King's College, London, found that UK towns whose daily local newspapers had shut, suffered from not just a 'democracy deficit' with reduced community engagement, but increased distrust of public bodies. As Dr Martin Moore, who directed the study, put it: "When [local papers] are depleted or in some cases simply don't exist, people lose a communal voice. They feel angry, not listened to and more likely to believe malicious rumour."

What is to be done? Firstly, the steady decline in the number of local titles is linked to the fact they are not profitable. If they were, they would still exist. More than that, new titles would be jostling for a place in the market. Reading our local or even national news online – and who among us does not do so to a varying extent – is simply not a money-maker for investors. Nor is there much evidence that we are willing to pay for access to online news in sufficient numbers. And advertising revenue from online links does not look likely to compensate for the decline in sales of print any time soon.

So we have a choice. Let our local news sources go under in the face of dysfunctional market forces or take new directions.

High quality local journalism is too important to be allowed to die. Luckily, some recent proposals floating around offer lifelines to titles facing bankruptcy or could even encourage the creation of new ones, possibly in the form of worker-owned co-operatives. Increased taxes from web giants like Facebook and Amazon could bankroll a new fund for investment in community-based, not-for-profit news sources, utilising both print and digital. The alternative is local information blackouts we will all come to regret.