NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss calls it an “extinction-level event.” Many of the affected newsrooms are members of the Guild, which started a campaign, Save The News, to raise awareness of the depth of the crisis and urging Congress to pass legislation that will enable the industry to survive it.

These days on the Cape, there are six weekly papers that are not owned by Gannett. Falmouth publishing, owned by the Hough family of Falmouth, owns four of those papers, the Enterprise in Famouth, Mashpee, Bourne and Sandwich. The others are the Cape Cod Chronicle, owned by Henry Hyora of Chatham, and the Provincetown Independent owned by co-founders Ed Miller and Teresa Parker of Wellfleet, and 14 other investors.

In a Michigan courtroom in 2018, just before former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was to be sentenced for molesting multiple teenage girls, then-state Attorney General Angela Povilaitis credited reporters at the Indianapolis Star for exposing Nassar’s years of abuse.

“What finally started this reckoning and ended this decades-long cycle of abuse was investigative reporting,” Povilaitis told the judge, who handed down a 40 to 175-year sentence.