Here’s a snapshot of the impact media consolidation is having in towns such as Mountain View, a city of about 70,000 between San Jose and San Francisco. A few years ago, three separate newspapers were covering Mountain View — the Knight Ridder’s San Jose Mercury News, the Palo Alto Daily News (then independently owned), and the Mountain View Voice, a weekly owned by the Palo Alto Weekly. In 2005, the Daily News was acquired by Knight Ridder. In 2006, KR’s papers were sold to MediaNews. According to this story by the Mountain View Voice, the Merc and Daily News have all but quit covering Mountain View. Even the city manager, Kevin Duggan, is lamenting the lack of news coverage:

“We seemed to get a lot more calls from the Daily a few years ago,” Duggan told the Voice, adding that the city “used to have a dedicated Mercury News reporter — we don’t at this point to my knowledge. … If it wasn’t for the Voice, the public would really lose a lot in keeping track of what’s going on in the city.”