Ed used to trust his local Berkshire daily newspaper to be the gold standard of accurate and complete local news coverage -- until, that is, his brother died. That's when he learned that news was now for sale, that in order to get his brother's obituary into the paper he had to pay big time. The local newspaper -- and others like it -- had abandoned their responsibility to record significant community events like the death of citizens if favor of a new rule: if you pay, you died. If you don't, you never existed.