Though it’s difficult to quantify the effect of declining local news coverage on our capacity to monitor infectious disease, it’s clear that local information is best positioned to prevent outbreaks. “A pandemic starts at the local level,” Madoff says. “The closer you can get to identifying a cluster and outbreak at its origin, the better. The further you get from the local, the bigger an outbreak needs to be before it gets noticed or picked up and the more likely it is to spread.”

The decline of local newsrooms could make it harder for us to detect the next disease outbreak – Columbia Journalism Review

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