Every city had an underground newspaper. The 'zines young people started putting out in the late 1980s and early 1990s were driven by individuals and rarely became community enterprises. All the while, the corporate press was changing too, becoming more consolidated and less local. Left-wing publications became independently owned islands in an increasingly corporate sea. The print media is more profitable than ever even as it cuts back on news gathering - a trend even decried by mainstream editors like Gene Roberts of the New York Times.
Circulation is stagnant or down.
FAIR released an interesting survey a few years ago showing that Washington journalists are more conservative on economic issues and more liberal on social issues than most of the public. This gap in perception between editors and parts of the public paves the way for community publications to take on big media against the odds. In fact, one of the largest problems with the news that the media critic George Trow pointed out long ago is that it is decontextualized information. It ignores the larger social contexts. It can be a historically aware frame or a theoretically informed one.