How A Small-Town Newspaper Solved A 51-Year-Old Murder Mystery

The decline of the small-town, or community paper, is a story that is currently playing out across the United States, and in pockets around the world where local media and local stories are being forced out by media fluff, media centralisation, and horrible media budgets everywhere. But, as this incredible story-behind-the-story told by the Poynter Institute shows, local media has a relevance and impact that most big names can't ever match at a community and individual level.

The story follows an unsolved mystery more than 50 years old: that of a missing woman, in a small community in Suffolk County. After coming across the case – which had never been reported in the local media at the time – the editor of the local newspaper, The Suffolk Times, decided to follow it up. Through the various reports that subsequently ran in the paper, a web of domestic violence and cover-ups were discovered, protecting the men at the heart of the missing woman's life and, as the story ultimately reveals, her death.

It is an incredibly powerful story, and a tribute to the importance of the efforts of investigative journalism of all shapes and sizes.