The Chicago Reader's Hot Type column by Michael Miner features an interesting discussion with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Richard Longworth. Longworth, a former Tribune foreign correspondent, has written a book entitled Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism.
The interview is worth reading. The problem, in a nutshell, is a Middle America disconnected from the world it must understand to survive. An illustrative anecdote:

"I've got a staff here of really smart newspaper people and almost none of them have probably been outside the United States. I've got to name one of them the foreign editor, and that person is going to have to edit the AP foreign wire, and there's nobody here with the world view, the international sophistication, to take that wire and turn it into something meaningful for my readers."

Longworth notes that "the midwest is a region largely abandoned by heavy industry, conquered by corporate agriculture, and occupied by immigrant workers essential to the economies of desperate towns whose natives loathe them." And the challenge, of course, is that being so disconnected from global events, these communities don't know what they're missing, and don't understand the negative impact of what they're missing. In Longworth's telling, however, some of this ignorance seems dangerously willful:

Unfortunately, even papers that do try to tell this story find their readers in denial. "Every once in a while a paper will rear back and really try to do a job--a big series on economic changes," Longworth told me. In the last few years, "the Cleveland Plain Dealer did this, with a long series called 'The Quiet Crisis.' . . . An editor at the paper told me the series was generally well received, 'but the two pieces specifically on globalization and immigration landed with a dull thud.' The Dayton Daily News did a good series, which most of the local leaders seem to have put down as useless negativism. This is a town that has already lost more than half its population."

It's clear that Longworth doesn't blame newspapers (the examples above show that papers are trying to do this job). Rather, he believes that the solution is a kind of regional newspaper serving as a kind of "regional Financial Times that covers both the Midwest and the globe with true quality journalism, and would work hard to link the Midwest to the globe."

I think that's a brilliant idea. I don't blame newspapers, necessarily, for going hyperlocal and abandoning the national news to elite, coastal publications that middle America can feel comfortable ignoring. People at newspapers large and small are trained to make a story local and relevant. If anything, papers in this part of the country missed the opportunity to make big stories local, instead choosing only to cover local stories.