Dear reader,On August 31 1997, editors at a vernacular daily in Thrissur faced a peculiar arithmetic of grief. Princess Diana had died in a car crash in Paris. Yet another accident, closer to home and involving two familiar names, had shaken the city’s suburbs. The paper, loyal to its patch of earth, refused to let the global event drown out local sorrow. The next morning, it ran a headline that still lives in Thrissur folklore: “Car accidents in Thrissur and Paris; three, including Princess Diana, die.”The story is apocryphal—probably. Yet it circulated among Thrissurians with the pride of civic legend, widely attributed to Thrissur Express, the daily founded in 1944. A school senior once introduced me to the paper as “The Washington Post of Thrissur.” He wasn’t joking. For readers across the city, Express commanded that reverence and more.Nearly every newspaper reader in town understood the paper’s legacy. At library meetings and literary gatherings—anywhere the state of media surfaced in conversation—people invoked its editors and stories with passion. Express belonged to Thrissur’s cultural heritage, inseparable from the city’s intellectual life. I never witnessed its prime years; the paper shut down on September 3, 2000.A few weeks ago, I came upon a Malayalam volume, Express Vazhikaattiya Kanal (Express: The Ember That Showed the Way) by local journalist Babu Velappaya. The book gathers more than 40 brief memoirs from politicians, religious leaders, former Naxalites, teachers, artists, businessmen, and journalists—a mosaic showing not just a newspaper’s importance but its role as institutional conscience. Express stood against power, consistently articulating anti-establishment values. In retrospect, it marks what Indian journalism has lost, especially the collapse of local newspapers that once held authority accountable.Thrissur Express defied convention from inception. Its first editorial appeared in English. Founder K. Krishnan had worked as a clerk at CNN School in Cherpu, a suburb, while serving as District Correspondent for The Indian Express—launched in 1932 by Ayurvedic physician P. Varadarajulu Naidu in Chennai. The Nationalist Movement shaped young Krishnan, who left his clerical job to build a printing press and publishing venture in Thrissur.The city then had an evening paper called Gomathi. Krishnan wanted a morning daily. He founded Express as a two-page broadsheet in single crown size, priced at a quarter anna. His command of English, honed at The Indian Express, led him to open with an English editorial.He wrote: “There are changing times and with every change, old ideas fade and institutions are slowly swept away in the terrible onrush of progress to the fulfillment of Man’s Destiny. There are those who deplore the passing away of old things, but those people are wrong in their narrow minded conservatism. There has been no stay since the Renaissance, and progress with incalculable consequences for the Brotherhood of Man, and of such a moment as this to which it is our good fortune to exist and in which it is our undoubted privilege to play an ever humble part as the Almighty deems fit to entrust us in the service of Humanity. It is in us therefore to keep the wall of the enslaved and conquered peoples of Europe will kindle such a fire as will rescue the world of the unspeakable abomination of Totalitarianism... We must make the world fit for men to live in unmenaced by dark shadows of tyranny where each man may go about his tasks unmolested, where each man may fashion his own destiny unhampered by any outside dictate and where such a man is conceded the indispensable and inalienable right to draw a deep breath of a free and inspiring life. Freedom is not external; Our extension of freedom is but a result of our inner freedom. It is but a hollow boast to be proud of our civilisation, then alone shall we be able to establish a golden era of freedom and fortune. We must never forget the masses with whom rests the pride in our civilisation which is the very breath of that Freedom which we very much desire in the humble state of our own. We have to do what we can for the furtherance of KNOWLEDGE, TOLERANCE, and GOODWILL in the service of God and Man.”The founding team included journalists with socialist convictions. The editor knew his craft. Despite competition from Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi—publications with vast networks and marketing muscle—Express became Thrissur’s most influential paper. Krishnan remained promoter until 1970. His son Balakrishnan, who had surrendered a medical school seat, joined the family enterprise and took over as Chief Editor after his father’s death.Express employed formidable talents: Kunnath Janardhanan Menon, A.P. Nambiar, Karunakaran Nambiar, and later T.V. Achutha Warrier, who shaped the newspaper’s distinctive character. Its editorials became sought-after cultural artifacts; claiming to read them carried prestige.Under Achutha Warrier, according to Babu, the newspaper pioneered ecological reporting, then an emerging concern, driving the people’s movement to protect Silent Valley. During the Emergency, following The Indian Express’s example, the paper left its editorial column blank to protest censorship. Government censors demanded compliance. The editors responded with deliberately oblique critiques that still conveyed dissent.Express achieved impressive reach. At its height, Express Weekly claimed circulation above two lakh copies—surpassing established competitors and rivalling numbers that would make contemporary national weeklies envious. This success encouraged leaders to expand beyond Thrissur into other Kerala districts, helped by K.P. Unnikrishnan, an MP and Minister in V.P. Singh’s Janata government.The paper’s influence drew attention from the Janata Party, which, according to rumours, had ambitious plans for Kerala. Subramanian Swamy, its emerging power then, acquired a 51 per cent stake and brought in a revamp team. This period, unfortunately, marked the start of the decline. Swamy was chairman for seven years with apparent expansion plans, but little materialised. In 2000, the paper shut down.Indian journalism offers few parallels to this story—a local newspaper with such impact and reach. And this doesn’t reduce Express’s failures: it notably refused to oppose the 1959 dismissal of E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s first Communist Ministry in Kerala. Yet it upheld liberty, justice, and speech, establishing standards that challenged even national publications. Most importantly, Express embedded itself in readers’ consciousness—collective and individual. In that sense, it was a Washington Post, complete with its own Woodwards and Bernsteins, its minor Watergates, its incisive opinions and reporting.Why recall this history now, when Express has been dead nearly a quarter-century? Because it clarifies a civic infrastructure we dismantled without recognising the loss—or understanding what we accepted in exchange. The local newspaper once was something more than an information outlet; it was the arena where a community argued with itself, scrutinised its powerful, and built shared meaning from disparate experiences.Today, that space has fractured into algorithmic silos: the local influencer peddling sponsored content, the meme page trafficking in viral nihilism, the WhatsApp group circulating unverified outrage.This pattern repeats across geographies with unsettling consistency. Consider America’s heartland, where papers like Iowa’s Gazette or The Spokesman-Review in Spokane once employed statehouse reporters who knew every legislator’s voting record and could trace water rights disputes back decades.Britain’s provincial press—the Yorkshire Post tracking industrial politics in Leeds, The Scotsman covering Edinburgh’s civic life, The Western Mail chronicling Welsh devolution—were autonomous intellectual traditions. France had Ouest-France dominating Brittany, Germany its Rheinische Post in Düsseldorf, Spain El Periódico serving Barcelona in Catalan and Castilian.These weren’t romantic anachronisms at all. They had sophisticated operations: investigative teams, specialised beats, editorial boards that could summon officials for accountability. When The Arizona Republic exposed land fraud in the 1970s or when France’s Sud Ouest investigated municipal corruption in Bordeaux, they deployed resources and institutional patience no influencer can match.The crisis carries consequences beyond sentiment. Local newspapers created what scholars call “bridging social capital”—the connective tissue linking communities across class, ideology, and interest. A lawyer from Thrissur and a farmer from Irinjalakuda might disagree profoundly, but both read Express editorials, sharing reference points for democratic discourse.Today’s digital ecosystem fragments rather than connects, producing personalised realities that rarely intersect except in mutual incomprehension. The local influencer offers charisma, sometimes activism, but lacks the institutional capacity for sustained investigation or the independence to challenge advertisers and patrons at once.Algorithmic feeds privilege confirmation over complexity. We’re not mourning nostalgia; we’re watching democratic scaffolding being stripped away, with nothing equivalent rising in its place. The question isn’t whether Express was perfect—it wasn’t—but whether we’ve considered what we surrendered in its absence, and whether a functioning democracy can survive on memes and monetised outrage alone.I read and enjoyed Babu Velappaya’s book the same day I read an article on Frontline by Chirantan Chatterjee titled “When the BBC had to say sorry”, on the British broadcaster’s recent apology and Donald Trump’s threat to sue it regardless, which sends a sharp message about populism and press freedom. There was another piece we carried last week on the age of the thinkfluencers, on how public intellectuals are being displaced by “influencers”. Clearly, we are moving into a disruptive era where media and journalism face growing pressures from technology and rising authoritarianism, and in the coming days, we will need serious reflection on how to fight back and reclaim what was ours.Read the articles and write back with your memories of your favourite local paper, preferably vernacular. We’d love to hear them.Wishing you a lovely week ahead, Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor, FrontlineWe hope you’ve been enjoying our newsletters featuring a selection of articles that we believe will be of interest to a cross-section of our readers. Tell us if you like what you read. And also, what you don’t like! Mail us at frontline@thehindu.co.inCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS