Bob Schieffer is right. The decline of local media is totally terrible.

[Commentary] Outgoing CBS anchorman Bob Schieffer spent an hour with NPR's Diane Rehm and reflected on his career. In the process, Schieffer was asked to name the biggest threat to the future of journalism. He said the decline of local journalism. Here are some of Schieffer's comments: "Unless some entity comes along and does what local newspapers have been doing all these years, we're gonna have corruption at a level we've never experienced...Because there's nobody -- so many papers now can't afford to have a beat reporter. For example, many papers don't have a city hall reporter anymore. They send somebody to cover the city council meetings, but to cover city hall, you have to be there every day and you have to know the overall story, not just report whatever happens on a particular day."

Schieffer is absolutely right. Less than a third of all newspapers in the country assign a reporter -- part time or full time -- to cover statehouses, according to the Pew study. Almost nine in 10 (86 percent) of local TV stations have no part-time or full-time correspondent covering the statehouse. Although the fates of big national media organizations -- such as The Washington Post -- get most of the attention as we all try to adjust to the new editorial and business realities of journalism, the disappearance of the littler guys is actually a bigger story. Institutional knowledge -- knowing who to look at, where and when -- are not the sort of things that are easily replaced. And that's a loss for all of us who care about informing the public the best way we know how about their government and its politicians.