And now, the news. Or maybe not.

In more and more towns, traditional news reporting is disappearing. Which means people don’t know what the problems are, or how to get to solutions.

It isn’t difficult to find the 4th Street Food Store in Saguache, Colorado. It’s a beige storefront on one of the sleepy blocks that make up Saguache’s downtown. Part grocery store and part thrift shop, it’s a de facto community center for Saguache. Almost everyone knows the store’s energetic owner, Marge Hoglin, and much of the town seems to have their hand in some part of the store’s operation. On one December morning, it was quiet out front. No other cars passed me as I parked and then shoved my door open against the wind.

I was there to talk about the news, something this scrappy town of 500 doesn’t get a lot of.

Tucked between two mountain ranges in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, three hours’ drive from Denver and more than 100 miles from any town over 20,000, Saguache isn’t really on the way to anywhere. The sole weekly publication there, the Saguache Crescent, doesn’t cover news. (It’s a beautiful publication in its own right — printed on what’s billed as the nation’s last working Linotype — but that’s another story.) The Crescent prints what people submit — obituaries, fire hall fundraiser announcements, and columns written by town councilmembers, school principals and local historians — but produces no original news reporting. TV crews from bigger cities rarely venture to Saguache unless a wildfire erupts. A small, online-only startup, Saguache Today, that intends to cover the “good news” in Saguache, launched last fall, but its reporter lives 100 miles away. And though the community radio station in Alamosa, 50 miles to the south, dials in strong, it’s rarely with news about Saguache. Its news reporter, too, is strapped for resources — putting together a daily, 30-minute show on a part-time schedule.

Saguache is what some might call a news desert — a place without access to reliable, relevant information needed for people to be good citizens in their local community. News deserts can crop up anywhere — in the middle of a big city, or hours from the nearest stoplight. They happen largely when a local economy can’t support a traditional news business model with the revenue it takes to gather and publish the news. They’re becoming an increasingly frequent phenomenon as news organizations in many places cut back on staff or, sometimes, just close their doors.

I arranged chairs in the back of that beige storefront in Saguache to talk with two different groups of residents about the news. This was part of a project the Solutions Journalism Network is pursuing with funding from the LOR Foundation in Jackson, Wyoming: We wanted to hear how they stay informed about what’s going on in town, and to learn whether they get all the local news and information they need.

So, when news happens in Saguache, how do people know?

Instead of relying on a single traditional news outlet, most people I talked to in Saguache — and in many of the 10 small towns where I interviewed residents across Colorado, New Mexico and Montana — relied on word-of-mouth as their primary source for local news: both by old fashioned chit-chat as they ran into people at the Post Office or the 4th Street Store, and through more new-fangled means, like Facebook. People read the nearby Center Post Dispatch, as a secondary source, but to get the “real” story, many people told me, they called a person involved directly. Many relied on a friend, coworker or neighbor — someone who’s trustworthy either because of their connectedness in town or their personal credibility, or both — to keep them in the loop when important things happen. These people are news brokers — not just as first-hand sources, but also as repeaters of what’s published in the mainstream media.

Sometimes, that’s enough. As one resident put it: “We might say there’s gossip, and murmurs and some false information, but basically, you keep your circle large enough, you will find accurate, factual, good information.”

And in Saguache, word travels fast, making this kind of communication surprisingly effective at times. A vibrant community Facebook group with about 300 members offers, in some ways, the service that a mainstream news source might elsewhere. Last year, for instance, a countywide search for a missing hunter played out in real time on that Facebook page, with family members posting updates and asking for information — a news event that, in a larger town, might have headlined a local news outlet’s Web site with breaking updates. When the water is out on First Street in Saguache, you can bet someone has already asked about the problem — and someone else has speculated on an answer — on Facebook. Some people told me they like this interconnectedness, and the way information migrates socially from person to person.

But often, it’s hard to tell good information from the bad. And the news ecosystem people in Saguache described to me is far from systematic, critical coverage. Many agreed that word-of-mouth communication has its limits, and said they did not get the local news they needed or wanted.

There’s constant blur between information and misinformation, and not everyone has the time or ability to track down the “real story.” “I have gone to people and asked them,” one resident said. “I have gone right to the source and…just have not been able to find out the real story.”

Folks there are hungry for more context, clarity and a lack of bias in their news — and simply for more news coverage, period. Not having access to those things, they said, can leave people feeling alienated from the community, especially newcomers who don’t immediately have deep ties to the town. As one Saguache resident said, “I feel a little cut off from understanding the valley and the community as a whole. I know there are holes, so unless I have a chance to chat with [a friend who’s in the know], there’s something missing for me.”

There are some big issues there that cry out for thoughtful reporting, too. Saguache is a racially diverse town, and the conversation about race and colonization here is years behind where other communities seemed to be in terms of articulating the deep Hispanic-Anglo issues in this part of the country. No outright violence, people say — no kids fighting on the playground over race — but the two communities seem to keep their distance. There are profound economic challenges, too: Hardly anyone with a young family can make it in Saguache economically, unless they’re employed by the school district or county, or have decided to be starving artists.

Saguache is the seat of one of the state’s poorest counties. And yet, the town’s residents told me, regular news coverage of county government is hard to come by. There was a string of burglaries recently that no one knew about other than those who happened to hear it from their neighbors. And, in an amazing testament to what can happen in a community starved for reliable information, the town once went wild over a rumor that the Ebola virus had infected their drinking water. (It started with a warning that Saguache residents should boil their water after a test detected possible contamination from a different compound, the town’s mayor told me, and ended with the mayor and another government employee walking door-to-door for five hours, leaving flyers about the issue at all 250-some households.)

Without any trusted source to translate them, complex and mystifying issues stay just as mystifying and complex. That’s a challenge to the vitality of small towns like Saguache: When people don’t know what the problems are, it’s harder to get to solutions. What’s needed is not just access to relevant information, but to knowledge that can enable citizenship, empowering people to be more active and creative.

How can people in news deserts graduate from informal discussions to more concrete news gathering and information vetting? Can government or any other non-commercial groups catalyze local efforts in places where no other original reporting is happening? Clearly, the answers to these questions will be different in Saguache than in big, urban centers with more people, more complex institutions and more commerce to sustain news organizations. In Saguache, some suggested a writers’ workshop for locals interested in contributing to the Crescent. Others offered to donate grocery store gift cards to a motivated person who could write roundups of court proceedings, and even toyed with the idea of partnering with a journalism school to bring students to report on the town.

Everyone I spoke to cared about Saguache’s future, and many had chosen to live there for the distinctly small-town quality of life: where friends are easily met, mountains are nearby, and there’s no trace of the hustle or pretense of big city life. Everyone loves the Linotype Saguache Crescent, so much so they expressed concern that another media outlet coming into town might run the paper out of business. In the end, the place is small — and that’s important to folks.

That night, as I checked into The Lodge at Saguache motel on the outskirts of town, the owner and I chatted about economic development. How does she get tourists driving through town to turn off the highway and explore downtown, she asked, and maybe stay a night in her motel?

She handed me a key to my room, and I asked where I could get a meal. She looked shell shocked, then offered me a Hungry Jack frozen dinner from her freezer.

“Dinner hour is over in Saguache, honey,” she said. “Nothing’s open anymore.”

It was 8 p.m.