International small-town newspapers

My hometown is a small, American town of 10,000 people. It has a local newspaper, and it even comes out daily. They also have an RSS news feed. Do small towns of similar size in other countries have something similar?

How can I find them, especially the ones that are in English?

One point of comparison: Here in Germany a daily paper for a town of pop. 10 k would be pretty rare. A daily paper for a district of ~ 50 k to 200 k is more usual; a pretty common model outside the major conurbations is the Kopfblatt which has a district-specific masthead and consists of two bundles: the first one (Mantelteil) is produced by a more central editorial staff and has international/national/state news and ads, the second one (Lokalteil) has regional/district news and ads. For example, my local daily paper has a circulation of 40 k but the first bundle is produced for a circulation of 330 k. I doubt there is any local paper with an English-language version.

Even in the US it’s quite rare to have a daily for 10,000 people - what you have instead is a weekly that focuses on really local news - proms, graduations, people handing giant checks to other people, extremely vicious letters to the editor, etc. Most people who want the newspaper also get the nearest big daily.

I’m a periodicals librarian and we try to get a paper from every county at the minimum. We have, I dunno, maybe sixty South Carolina papers. I’d say two thirds of those are weeklies and a lot more of them ought to be. (Seriously, there’s enough news in Anderson to put out a newspaper every day?)

Local papers are dying here. Many have closed in recent years and many more are are published over a wide area with some local content… We have a weekly, and much of its content is common to several nearby towns that get a slightly tailored version with different names.
When I lived in Huddersfield in the 1980s the Daily Examiner still published on a daily basis but that conurbation was much larger.

You want to look at a book called Editor & Publisher Market Guide, which your local library may have. It costs $160 U.S., and E&P uses a lot of resources to put it out, so they don’t make it available free online. Even the latest edition will be out of date, in these days of newspaper closings, but it likely will be the most current you can get save doing time-consuming individual searches yourself.

ETA: Zsofia, do you have this? My library does.

Sure - we’ve got tons of periodical reference materials. There’s an Editor & Publisher International Year Book that’s probably what you need, but I’m not sure if it’s current, and my leg is in a cast so I don’t feel like getting up to look at it. :slight_smile:

I used to use www.paperboy.com to find websites of local newspaper from around the world. You can sort by country, city, and language, but not, alas, by city population. You’ll have to do some investigation to see which are dailies. Trying it today for the first time in quite a while, I find many of the links are dead.