Great local reporting stands between you and wrongdoing. And it needs saving.

[Commentary] In only 15 years, American newspaper companies slashed their workforces by more than half — from 412,000 employees in 2001 to 174,000 in 2015. But that troubling trend wasn’t on the minds of journalists at the Charleston Gazette-Mail last year as they dug deep into the prescription-drug epidemic that was inflicting mortal wounds on their community. No, what motivated them was the West Virginia paper’s unofficial motto: “Sustained outrage.” That phrase, coined by former publisher Ned Chilton, “means a lot to people here,” executive editor Robert Byers told me last week, shortly after the 37,000-circulation paper won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The family-owned paper (Chilton’s daughter is the publisher now) has a newsroom staff of about 50. “Sustained outrage” is vitally important. So is keeping it alive.