Americans are increasingly skeptical about whether the news media does them any good.

Well, one under-appreciated benefit of this country's shrinking and disappearing newspapers is that they pay—or, in the cases of America's already disappeared newspapers, used to pay—journalists to sit through boring civic meetings and then report back to the general public on what went down.

Which brings Danny Westneat to the city of Kent, Washington, about 20 miles south of Seattle. There, in September of 2015, the Kent City Council held a public meeting about a number of boring-sounding things, the most soporific of them probably being the vaguely-worded last item on the agenda, “Property Negotiations, as per RCW 42.30.110(1)(c).”

As Westneat writes, that last item actually involved the Kent City Council tossing a huge public park into private hands:

With no public discussion and nobody looking on, they agreed to sell a 10-acre public park to a developer to be turned into a housing subdivision.

It took more than four months for the general public to find out.

How could such a thing happen?

As a young reporter, Westneat used to cover Kent City Hall for a local newspaper that no longer exists. "At council meetings I’d often see three or four other reporters there," he writes. "All those newspapers or news bureaus now are defunct." In fact, according to Westneat there's only one newspaper left in Kent: "A weekly with only two reporters covering a city of 125,000."

That newspaper, the Kent Reporter, eventually broke the story about the park's sale, which is now being hotly contested by Kent citizens.

Something to think about the next time Gallup calls. Or, say, the next time a politician like Donald Trump, capitalizing on the public's declining trust in the media, bashes the press in front of his followers (who then turn on the press in ugly ways).