“As many newspapers struggle to stay economically viable, fewer than half of Americans (43 per cent) say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community ‘a lot’. Even fewer (33 per cent) say they would personally miss reading the local newspaper a lot if it were no longer available,” reports the Pew Research Center, as part of the News Interest Index project.
(…'[D]ata relating to news coverage were collected from March 2-8, 2009 and survey data measuring public interest in the top news stories of the week were collected March 6-9, 2009 from a nationally representative sample of 1,001 adults’.)
(thanks: @amonck)