Is this a ‘golden age’ for community newspapers?

In less than a year, M.E. Sprengelmeyer has gone from being the Washington correspondent at the Rocky Mountain News — covering everything from 9/11 to the war in Iraq — to owning a community newspaper in a small New Mexico town. He writes about his experience on the Save the News blog, and about his optimism about the state of community journalism. “Think of a community newspaper as a bronze statue in the town square,” he writes. “Everybody in town can look up and see that it’s there.”