Corporations vs New Haven's Local News

I got excited when I saw that the Wall Street protests and the resulting police brutality finally made the mainstream news (somewhat).  Let's hear it for the brave protesters and for Youtube!  We sure know it took too long for the Troy Davis story to hit.  The corporate media is a travesty.  But here's a happy story about the closest city to the suburb where I'm from.  A town where the police are notoriously corrupt and there is a lot of poverty and crime.  Home of the Black Panther struggles and the Yale Takeover.  Which we affectionately call, Gun Wavin' New Haven.  But it's not all gloom and doom.  My mom says they just opened up an Apple Store.

Growing up "in" New Haven Connecticut, the main newspaper was the New Haven Register.  It was your typical careful newspaper that would never speak out against the Police Departments or white collar crime.  There was also the New Haven Advocate to combat this bought out media but it was pretty tame.  The Advocate used to be owned independently up until the 90's but is now owned by the owner of Fox 61.  They're now suffering layoffs (hate to see people lose jobs but) because...Dun Dun Dun...  New Haven has the the nonprofit New Haven Independent which is a much more honest publication.  And they seem to be growing to be the authority in local news.  In fact, I hear that even the televised news now goes to the Independent as it's primary source of information, bypassing the other publications.

Editor and founder of the site, Paul Bass (used to work at the advocate,) who has been a reporter for thirty years, thinks that the New Haven Independent’s nonprofit model can be used by others to help bring vigor back into community journalism as a paper’s focus should be on reporting, not profits.  He says “It goes back to the old-fashioned purpose of a newspaper—to promote civic debate, rather than sell toasters."  


Any thoughts from New Haveners?  How progressive is it?  How influential etc.?


Here's a cool article I just found from 2009.
The Reconstruction of American Journalism
 http://www.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_american.php
"American journalism is at a transformational moment, in which the era of dominant newspapers and influential network news divisions is rapidly giving way to one in which the gathering and distribution of news is more widely dispersed..."