Maven Mapper's

This morning I woke up on Super Tuesday preparing to cover the election with fervor.  I walked out to grab the local paper out of the box in an obligatory step towards depositing the same paper in the recycling bin moments later.

My local newspaper is pretty abysmal.  I live in the Charlotte suburbs in North Carolina and after living in Atlanta, Boca Raton, Peoria, Illinois and many other cities around the country since the dawn of the internet, it seems to me that local newspapers are on the verge of collapse. 

My local newspaper today offered up a sampling of local voters and how they might vote (even though North Carolina is not part of the Super Tuesday primary traffic jam).  Now this area of North Carolina as is most areas of North Carolina is thick in the bible belt and heavily Republican.  You would think that they would have a Republican heavy sampling.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth, it would appear that the Newspaper didn't bother to dig far enough to find a decent sample.

So out of curiousity I would like to ask my readers, rhetorically speaking, is your local newspaper gasping its last gasp?

I see people of all ages including elderly baby boomers hitting retirement accepting the internet and using it regularly. Can local newspapers continue to survive in such an environment where your average citizen runs a better blog than their local paper?

What's next? the local library. Will we stop hitting the library for books, looking instead to online dealers or check out options?