A lot of journalists awoke November 9 to the same grim revelation: I don’t know the country I’m living in! We looked for culprits and found them in ourselves. We in the media had somehow failed to adequately inform them, the nation’s Trump supporters, of their candidate’s utter unsuitability to be president. And equally, we failed to inform ourselves. Out of a delusional belief in polls as the best way to reveal the American mind, we reached election day having no idea of what the electorate was about to do.

Clark might have added another title to her list of moribund journals—Belt itself. Belt‘s a three-year-old online magazine whose focus is the Rust Belt, the region that flipped this month from blue to red and made Donald Trump our next president. I wrote about Belt two years ago, when it was an online magazine a year old; Anne Trubek, Belt‘s founder and editor, allowed then that every Rust Belt city thinks of itself as unique and is; yet they all faced “similar difficulties—aging housing stock. . . the loss of manufacturing, depopulation, vacancy, the prospect of shrinking, etc.”

       I’m thinking of The Rocky Mountain News (defunct), The Boston Phoenix (defunct), The Green Bay Press-Gazette, The Flint Journal, The Columbus Dispatch, The Pittsburgh Press-Gazette. I’m thinking of ethnic media, like Michigan Chronicle and the Chicago Defender. Where I grew up in Southwest Michigan, it’s a desert of reported local news. Most of the country can say the same.

       This near-erasure of a news infrastructure over huge stretches of the country has a serious impact on our democracy. Omnipresent issues that might rise to the surface in, say, Michigan or Wisconsin, never do; the national press that is almost entirely clustered on coasts is never alerted. Locally, the news vacuum contributes to a profound cycle of disinformation that citizens are fed about what is happening in their disinvested regions, and why. And, as a particularly prescient journalist suggested to me this week, not having local reporters among you—visible, part of your neighborhood, someone turning out dispatches from the school board meetings—makes it easier to demonize “journalists” and “the media.” They start to seem distant and scary, just like politicians.

Then, an admission: “And yet even we did not predict Trump’s win.”