Retired Glens Falls Post-Star editor Ken Tingley is out with another volume of columns titled, “The Last American Editor: Volume 2 -- Chronicling Life, Death, Triumph and Tragedy in a Small Town.”

Of the anthology, another well-respected scribe, Will Doolittle, writes, “Ken’s reporting unearths what lies beneath the surface of the community, a model of journalism that is vanishing.”

Tingley captures that spirit both in his books and his Substack column The Front Page, which you can subscribe to at kentingley.substack.com.

Tingley spoke with Capital Tonight about his latest book, as well as a new report out from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism showing that over half of the counties in the United States have just one or no local news outlets.

Warren County, where Glens Falls is located, is one of those areas.

“It’s profound. I was thinking about that this election season because it was local elections. I don’t think a lot of people didn’t even know who was running. And you’re going to see the voter turnout go down. They’ve already documented these things; when there’s not a newspaper there, voter turnout goes down. There’s more corruption, taxes go up,” Tingley said. “There’s no watchdog.”

Not surprisingly, news deserts are most common in rural and less affluent counties.

News deserts give rise to another symptom of a troubled democracy: Voters in news deserts depend more on national news, which tends to frame politics through the lens of the two major parties.

Local newspapers are much more responsive to voters’ needs, according to Tingley, and therefore more trusted than some national media.

“Ultimately, people did kind of trust the local newspaper because they could call up the editor and give him hell,” he said.