Twenty-four years ago, in the summer after my third year of college, I took a barely paid internship at the local newspaper in Missoula, Montana. I agreed to spend a few hours a week working at the paper in exchange for a couple hundred dollars over three months.

To pay my bills, I worked at a trendy downtown restaurant, topped up with a couple of shifts a week in a clothing store at the mall. In my second week at the paper, the local government reporter went on vacation and the editor asked me to cover the city council meetings while he was away. That reporter walked off the job and didn’t come back, at least while I was there. I jumped into his shoes with delight, still serving food downtown five days a week to pay my rent and bills.

Somehow, I didn’t see a big problem until the morning I interviewed the mayor and city manager about new building projects, then served them lunch a couple of hours later. I was amused; they seemed embarrassed. I realized I had stepped into something strange and exploitative, but I was having too much fun to care.

It was the summer I got hooked on journalism. I wrote about dangerous street crossings and necessary new construction, and exposed that several city council members were in the habit of skipping committee meetings where the bulk of their work happened. That story ticked off the council members, but they started going to meetings. Reporting brought near-instant results.

In the years since, I’ve never seen the impact of journalism so clearly as I did that summer writing about local government in a smallish western American town. The internship led to a part-time job on the police beat, then eventually a full-time post as a statehouse reporter in the Montana capitol. After several years of covering state government, I went to work as a reporter in China – a country where censorship and intimidation mean that journalism’s impact is rarely, if ever, seen clearly or quickly.

The barely paid part of my first internship should have clued me in to the fact that local newspapers were not healthy businesses. I’m not sure I would have cared, even if I had understood the doomed economics. Back then, the company that owned the Missoulian and several of the other largest dailies in Montana drew a ridiculously hefty profit margin from their properties, but the internet lay ahead and nobody knew quite what would happen.

We do now. Local and regional newspapers across the US have bled cash, staff and readers, and in the process lost much of their authority as watchdogs and influencers. In the wake of the most divisive presidential election in recent memory, and the midst of many hand-wringing treatises on the state of journalism, we’ve somehow overlooked what happened with local news, the place where most Americans used to get the bulk of their information. The scaffolding of American journalism, a basic bulwark in our apparently delicate system, is crumbling.

In its place, we’ve been left with a vacuum that filled easily through the presidential campaign and into today with Donald Trump’s bombastic, often racist and sexist reality-TV-style rhetoric and antics.

The pivot: more national news, less local reporting

“The real crisis in American journalism is not technological, it’s geographic,” said Tom Rosentiel, fellow at the Brookings Institution who founded and ran for 16 years the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center. “The crisis is that local journalism is shrinking. I wouldn’t say it’s dying but it’s the most threatened.”

This is certainly true in Montana, where a recent study found that people get their news online, but still gravitate most toward the websites of their local papers and television stations. Local press isn’t dead, but it’s fragmented and weakened. Talk to readers, and you’ll find they believe local news these days is both less enticing and less accessible – and thereby less likely to be shared on Facebook, that great master of content.

“There is so much more national and international news available to people, it has changed what people are interested in,” said Rosentiel. During the election, “I saw clear and distinct evidence that people were consuming more national news and less local.”

At their peak in 1990, US newspapers employed 56,900 people full-time in newsrooms, according to data from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. By 2015, that number had plummeted to 32,900. Most of these missing newsroom employees were not working at the national newspapers where our post-election journalistic worries have fixated. They toiled in local and regional newsrooms, in the teams that long covered often mundane but critically important workings of cities, towns and states. Newsrooms and state bureaus are decimated, and staffed with younger, cheaper talent – equally stretched and hard-working but missing much of the institutional knowledge and confidence critical to successful journalism.

This is important. Unlike the press in Europe or elsewhere, American media has long been distinctly local, often employing reporters and editors in their own communities, bringing to light voices that reflect the makeup of their readership.

The US has 1,300 newspapers, only three or four of which are national, said Rosentiel. We have 600 local television stations and six national networks. Our news structure is based on local and regional first, but that dynamic is changing, thanks in large part to social media. Suddenly, presidential politics trumped local and state – something I had never seen before in my home state.

‘We all travel in completely different information channels’

Ken Toole has been around Montana politics and government for most of his life. I used to talk to him regularly about rightwing hate movements in the state when he headed a group called the Montana Human Rights Network. He later won a seat on the state utility watchdog, the public service commission, and today lives almost off the grid, on a sparsely populated piece of country near the Continental Divide.

He has little in common politically with his few neighbors; they all get their information from different sources. Toole reads his local newspaper with growing frustration at its declining size and shrinking coverage. His neighbors draw their news from conservative talk radio and other right-leaning outlets. Social media magnifies these divides.

“We all travel in completely different information channels,” said Toole. “When that happens, persuasion is just not an option.”

Complaining about the local paper is nothing new; in fact it’s long been sport in most of America. And our press has not always been free and unfettered. In Montana, several of the largest newspapers were for decades in the first half of the 20th century owned by the same mining company that exploited the state’s workers and natural resources.

Today, with overworked and stretched staff and vastly shrunken news holes, we have entered a new, sinister era. Papers are smaller and their content is more limited, less nuanced. Older journalists who know their beats sometimes better than those they cover have been shunted aside, in favor lower-paid reporters who use Twitter and Instagram well, but lack foundations in history and investigations.

Reporters across the country are keenly aware of the challenge. Scott Reinardy, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas, has spent a decade studying the trend through in-depth surveys in newsrooms across America, looking at how the industry’s retrenchment has affected morale and output.

“The general response is we’re not filling the need as well as we used to. But the commitment remains,” said Reinardy. “There is tremendous commitment to produce great journalism, but it’s not feasible or possible any more. We’re just not equipped to do it.”

The situation is well-suited to politicians who don’t want to answer tough questions from the public, or its proxy, the press. I understood this to be the case in China, where government officials rarely speak with reporters or answer unscripted questions. In return trips to Montana, I’ve been surprised to see it growing in measure here.

Elected officials, especially those who use social media, are more comfortable taking their message straight to the public through Facebook and Twitter than they are relying on reporters.

“What I have seen is since the onset of social media, we have so much more control and capability over our own message and the destiny of our messages,” said Theresa Manzella, a Tea-Party Republican who serves in Montana’s house of representatives. “I like the fact that I can control the message. I can control my words and the emotion I convey.”

‘Free press is basic to the American nature’

A bright spot in local journalism has sprung up in Montana thanks to Maury Povich. Yes, that Maury Povich. The talk-TV personality known best for revealing on-air paternity test results to fraught families has spent 20 summers and many Christmases with his wife, the journalist Connie Chung, and their family in Montana’s Flathead Valley.

A decade ago, Povich opened the Flathead Beacon, a weekly newspaper that has won multiple awards and wide respect for its deep, nuanced coverage of local issues. This, said Povich, is his philanthropy. He saw a declining local newspaper in his corner of Montana and felt the citizens deserved better than sporadic coverage of local issues. The weekly now has a staff of 20 and a strong readership online and in print.

“It is so basic to the American nature, to have a free press,” Povich told me by phone from New York. “You can’t have a free press without a press.”

“What happens is, for instance, politically, local governments seem to have no checks, no balances,” he continued. “Too often, the population hears about something after the fact. When commissions aren’t covered, when council meetings aren’t covered, when zoning boards aren’t covered, the politicians are going to do what they feel like doing and they may be swayed by a business community that wants a particular variance.”

These sorts of complications don’t always come from controversial figures.

In Missoula late last year, the well-liked, full-time and well-paid mayor took a month off, admirably, to go to rehab for a drinking problem. The public didn’t learn of his absence until he’d been gone a week. When he did return, he refused to take any questions from reporters, instead explaining his absence and intent to run for re-election in an open letter. But here’s the really surprising part: judging from the flood of supportive comments on social media, the decision doesn’t seem to have cost him fans. Both the mayor and his PR person (who ignored my request for an interview) worked at the local newspaper for years.

Ginny Merriam, his communications director and a former longtime local journalist, joked with the mayor that had she been on the beat, she would have found out the reason for his absence and written a story within hours of his leaving.

“As a journalist, I think that’s really bad. As a city communications director, I’d rather work with a smart reporter on news,” Merriam told me. “It’s fundamentally part of our free society. We have to be held accountable by journalists.”

I went back to that city manager I interviewed and then served lunch to 24 years ago in Missoula to ask what he thought of recent developments in the relationship between those who govern and the voters.

Dennis Taylor is an exemplary public servant, a city manager in several western cities, a former Marine who was wounded in action in Vietnam. Today, he’s still active in governance, including as part of the Montana advisory committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights, which a few months ago held a public forum on border town racism in Montana – a state with seven Indian reservations. Taylor suggested the meeting be held in Montana’s largest city, Billings, to generate the most news coverage. One reporter – a former daily newspaperman who runs his own well-read and scoop-serving news website – showed up.

I asked Taylor if he thought that two decades ago a Montana mayor would have been able to take a month off without telling the public in advance, even for private health reasons, and not risk public outcry.

“Absolutely you could not have done it in Missoula, not in Helena, not in Billings,” he said. “It absolutely could not have happened in the old days. I feel like there is no investigative journalism.

“Everything is a news release,” said Taylor, who gets much of his own news these days from journalists he follows on Twitter.

With the long, slow decline of local media likely to continue, I asked Povich for his advice on saving local news. Without a wealthy benefactor who has a deep commitment to journalism, the Flathead Beacon is not a model that can be scaled out nationwide. In the beginning, Povich lost around $1m a year funding the weekly. Today, the paper is “nearly at cash flow”.

While Povich is thinking of taking his project statewide online, there aren’t enough civic-minded local journalism advocates across America to save the institution of journalism, one local newspaper at a time. So where do we go from here? Independent digital press, the kind already emerging in Montana, could keep the local press alive.

“I think any enterprising person who values journalism can take it upon themselves for very little money to start their own news site,” he said. “I mean, that’s the future of news in this country.”

“You’ve got to value journalism. If you don’t value a free press, you’re stuck.”