City council meetings can be lived-streamed, auto-transcribed, and their agenda can be posted. People will still of course offer their opinions on the subject on their social medias. We don't need newspapers to do this.
And most importantly they follow up. The meeting is the start. Ihe rest is follow through. If the council are approving a special zoning permit, they go out and talk to neighbors, or the contractors previous special work, etc.
To say that you can just get some text is a bit like suggesting that wget is a good replacement for a web browser. Sure it does some of the stuff, but it isn't the real deal.
I think somehow dreaming up a local newspaper that does the same in-depth reporting as, say, the New York Times is just dumb and and doesn’t really help someone arguing in favor of local journalism.
Just summarizing the most important points that were discussed during a council meeting is actually plenty good enough. You could do better, but even just that provides quite a lot of value.
A number of years back, my town had a very good local newspaper that was sort of someone's labor of love but they became ill and, now, no newspaper. I basically have no knowledge of what's going on in town unless it rises to the level of importance where it gets coverage beyond the town lines. To be sure, I'm not really interested in most of what goes on but it would be nice to know.
One of the most important functions of the news is to pick and chose which information is important and relevant and to present that information in an understandable way. To fulfill that function they do not even have to go digging for extra information (though that certainly helps and can also, crucially, help in actually picking what’s important and relevant).
What I need is an accurate and neutral summary of the things I should care about so when it comes time to vote in a couple years I can decide if I want to keep the current government or not.
Accurate and neutral is hard. Nobody is unbiased. The decision to cover/not cover something is both important and biased. Every project has pros-cons. The very first one is cost vs value: if you don't do the project you don't spend some money and taxes go down leaving more money for residents to do their own thing with, but they don't get the benefit of the project.
Most of what I see online is a quote - probably taken out of context - that makes the someone person look bad. I don't care if a politician is a good speaker, I care if the ultimate policy is good and this is a complex question.
Interestingly Eye is very slim and only published fortnightly, which reflects the work involved in doing the job properly. And they are very seldom wrong.
Or that didn't happen and mismanagement goes unnoticed for much longer.
Some of that is budgetary, but a lot of it is that a lot of politicians don't actually have an interest in being held accountable, so you need someone to go down there and do it.
Besides, how many people are going to read a full meeting transcript every month? Very few, and typically only those motivated and thus biased by what's going on. You need a summary for a broad audience and you certainly can't trust those running the meetings to make one.
Want to cast the goings on, all of them, of your local council meetings into darkness? Have them do exactly what you just described without any journalists around to catch it.