It was only seven days ago that we told you about The Stranger, the Seattle alt-(bi)weekly that was facing a financial crisis because of the city’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, which shut down concerts, bars, restaurants, and so many other events that provide the advertising fuel for an alt-weekly.

Last week, in a Q&A about covering losses in the journalism industry, Poynter reporter Kristen Hare observed that the newsroom mergers and consolidations that have resulted from the coronavirus pandemic often use terminology to obscure the full breadth of the loss. “If you lose a newsroom, and everybody in that newsroom has lost their jobs, and that community no longer has a newsroom, it’s closed,” Hare said. “It’s not a ‘merger.’ It’s a loss for the community.” 

We found that the topics people thought were most important for local news to cover were local health updates and information about local entities that provide critical services, such as hospitals, grocery stores, and local government.

When it came to the coverage newsrooms provided, we found that posts about how local government was responding to the virus and how local businesses were responding to or affected by the virus were most common.