Nor will independent content creators for the most part go to a lot of boring town and city meetings to find out what's going on--or develop relationships with the various low level officials/administrators. A number of years back my town had a local newspaper that was basically someone's labor of love. It no longer has one so I have essentially no source of information about any town issues I might want to be aware of. That doesn't matter to me for the most part but it would be nice to know about happenings/votes/etc. that affect me.
I think that's key. When people really care they are the ones who ask the product/project/service how they can support them.
The truth might be that people don't value reading most articles. I know that starting a newspaper is a huge investment, but I guess people just don't care. It might be because we don't have time to read, we get "news" from Facebook, no idea--but that much seems to be true.
