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With the decline in readership, many newspapers have gone out of business. Others have been bought up by larger media companies, which have then merged the acquired publications and streamlined reporting to reduce redundancy. These developments have led to a decrease in newspaper competition. For example, although the overall U.S. population increased between 1950 and 2008, the number of daily papers in the United States dropped from 1,772 to around 1,400 in those same years. Back in the mid-1920s, about five hundred American cities had two or more newspapers with separate owners. By 2010, fewer than fifteen cities had more than one independent, competing paper. This situation doesn’t bode well for a society that values open debate of ideas and interpretation of important events through a free press. How informed can we be if we have access to just one viewpoint on any particular issue or seek out only like-minded opinions on blog sites? And how can we make smart decisions—about crucial matters such as whom to vote for, where to send our children to school, or how to invest our hard-earned savings—if we’re not as informed by newspaper reporting at the same level as earlier generations?