DUXBURY, Mass.

DOES THE LOCAL newspaper, the kind that publishes news about the board of selectmen, honor rolls, Little League scores and who’s just back from Jamaica, have a place in the news business? It’s a fair question, considering the bad ink underscoring the state of the metropolitan press, which is now staggering under many reverses: declining circulation, hemorrhaging classified ads, falling display-ad revenue and waves of competition from the Internet and other media.

The weekly newspaper cannot entirely escape an ebbing tide but it can, because of its parochial nature — it’s hard to out-niche a niche — weather the maelstrom and, under the right circumstances, thrive as well. In 1996 there were 6,977 weekly newspapers in America, with an aggregate circulation of 45.9 million. By 2004 there were 7,490 weeklies, with a total circulation of 50.2 million. Over the same period, the number of dailies fell to 1,496 from 1,520 and daily circulation dropped to 52.3 million last year from 56.9 million in 1996.

There is good evidence that the numbers, particularly on the daily side, will continue in the same direction. The news is equally bleak on the advertising side for daily papers, with sales figures from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) showing a decline in daily ad sales of more than $6 billion from 2000 to 2007. Hardest hit was classified advertising, which last year alone fell by 16.5 percent from 2006. The downward spiral continues.

Meanwhile there are some breathtaking statistics coming out of the Internet. Online advertising over the past five years has risen from the hundreds of millions to an estimate of nearly $25 billion this year. A Web server survey reports there were 108 million distinct Web sites on the Internet in 2007. Domain Tools.com has 104 million active domain names registered and Google’s search index now stands at more than 8 billion pages. (For daily newspapers, online advertising increased from $1.2 billion in 2003 to $3.1 billion last year, according to the NAA. If that’s good news, so too is that millions of readers — daily and weekly — are reading their papers online.)

With oceans of information floating about, one would think it a snap to find out what the Duxbury Zoning Board of Appeals did last week on Harry Whoever’s application to build 10 houses off Loring Road. But unless you read the Duxbury Clipper or go to the Clipper’s Web site, you won’t know. And therein lies the problem for the big boys.

Content is what matters and local content is what matters most in weekly newspapers. With more than 16,000 employees and a jaw-dropping budget, Google still can’t compete with the three-member staff of Duxbury Clipper. Even alleged hyper-local portals such as Topix.com or hellolocal.com or scores of other so-called local sites cannot compete at the local level because they have no local news gatherers. What offerings they do have (headlines and lead paragraphs) come from feeds from local newspapers that, in most cases, return the browser to the newspaper’s Web presence.

The local-yokel press can ignore the world and the country and the state, for that matter, to concentrate on what happens in its own backyard. That attracts the Ma and Pa merchants — the weekly staple — who can’t advertise outside their own market area. Weeklies, never having the classified clout of dailies, are far less affected by the likes of Craig’s List or eBay, and, for the most part, aren’t wounded by the loss of big-box-store advertising. They never had much of that, either.

The provincialism that defines weeklies and protects them as well doesn’t mean that local newspapers can gloat their way to safe haven. Circulation is still a worry and will prompt more weeklies to go free (for guaranteed household penetration that dailies can’t hope to match). They have to maintain a strong editorial presence (the content factor) to fend off competition. They also must offer a current, easy-to-read presence on the Web that remains relentlessly local.

And they have to understand that change, being inevitable, requires them to forever adapt to changing times.

David S. Cutler owns the Duxbury (Mass.) Clipper and co-owns 20 weeklies in New Hampshire, central Massachusetts and northern Connecticut.