The late House Speaker Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill’s most famous aphorism was “All Politics Is Local.” Having had the distinct pleasure and educational benefit of working with Tip on his memoirs 20 years ago, I know that his meaning for this saying was: what matters most is what matters to me. The issue was less geography, in the speaker’s view, than it was popular self-interest.

Tip’s classic insight comes to mind because of an item in the Phoenix, a Providence, RI, alternative paper, reporting that the Providence Journal is closing several of its remaining bureaus around the state. The Phoenix says that the Journal, which had 16 state bureaus in the mid-1950s, now has two. I spent the summer of 1965 in the Journal’s North Providence office (and was later transferred to Bristol ), so I remember what it meant for the state to be so extensively covered by the downtown behemoth. I once began a story about a local politician in North Providence by observing, “Despite his Italian-German ancestry, Dante R. Giammarca is the Young Turk of town politics.” This caused problems for Giammarca because of the town’s Greek community, which wanted nothing to do with someone identified as a Turk.

These bureaus were staffed by young reporters who made the daily rounds for zoned editions. As a state, Rhode Island isn’t exactly a colossus, but the Journal and its now departed p.m. partner, the Bulletin, rode astride it with authority. The Belo Corporation acquired the Journal in 1997 and has made the predictable fiscal changes, buyouts, bureau closings, upgrading the Web site and justifying it all by saying that they were necessary. Very much the same pattern has played out in other vaunted state franchises. The Des Moines Register pulled coverage back to the city in the 1990s, closing most of its state bureaus. The Louisville Courier-Journal, a family-owned newspaper that, like the Register, sold to Gannett, has just closed three of its local bureaus, leaving only the one in the state capital, Frankfort .

The New York Times ran a major story on the closing of the Courier-Journal’s Hazard, Kentucky , bureau and quoted executive editor Bennie L. Ivory as saying, “We were not growing in the state and there’s real potential to grow our suburban market.” The Times said the Courier-Journal is available in Hazard by next-day mail and coverage of the mining community would come from Louisville .

Obviously, the corporate owners of these newspapers are convinced that financial viability is dependent on rejiggering resources. And for all the concern over newspaper revenues and readership, Belo and Gannett are still making lots of money, more perhaps than they would have if they had those local bureaus.

But there is another side to this argument, as Tip would surely tell you. News is what matters most to the reader: schools, taxes, crime, obituaries, the whimsical feature about a neighbor. No matter how determined editors are to cover news from downtown, something has to be missing when the reporters are no longer roaming the corridors of town hall. One of the most striking features about papers like the Journal, the Register, and the Courier-Journal is that to the casual reader traveling through the state (at least), they feel so generic. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t good reporters hustling to make an impact and gathering lots of valuable information. My impression is that the Newhouse newspapers in particular—including the Newark Star-Ledger, the Oregonian, and the New Orleans Times Picayune—are as formidable as ever and perhaps more so in covering their regions.

But it is undeniable that many of the bigger newspapers famed for their local coverage are relying more on syndicated services and standard lifestyle features to fill their pages than on the grittier news product generated by bureaus and other forms of ground-level coverage.

And that is the irony: in the age of the internet, from millions of special-interest sites to Google and Yahoo, what is trending down is something newspapers have done best. They covered the day-to-day developments that matter to the local community in a way that looked and felt important to the readers. There are surely local Web sites everywhere providing data and classified advertising, but the value of, say, the North Providence bureau, was that it was supervised by editors of experience and the news came packaged in a way that made readers proud (or furious, which was also useful).

As Tip framed the notion, politicians and newspapers had best remember that their constituents care above all about what is happening in their lives; the big issues writ small. The challenge for journalism as it evolves in so many different ways is to make readers care about what it is being presented to them as news. You can do that from downtown, but it is hard.

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos' columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.