From today’s vantage point, when many American cities struggle to sustain even a single print newspaper, the early decades of the 20th century look like glory days for local papers. Even small cities boasted two or three dailies. Larger cities might issue more than a dozen apiece. “City desks” hummed with activity, as reporters worked up stories on the regular local beats: crime, politics, schools, society, sports. Many papers built lavish headquarters buildings that became signatures of the skyline, from Philadelphia’s Inquirer Building to Oakland’s Tribune Tower.
  Yet to refer to any 20th-century daily paper as a “local paper” hides an important truth: the proportion of newspaper content that was written, designed, and printed locally decreased in the early 20th century. Aided by a new technology called the stereotype, syndicates began to sell the same articles and illustrations to hundreds of different newspapers around the country. Meanwhile, publishers like William Randolph Hearst and E. W. Scripps bought up multiple papers to form chains, which shared content among themselves …