IT’S A GRIM moment for American democracy. The president-elect suggested he might rule as a dictator and trust in the federal government is at historic lows.

How did we get here? The list is long, but one factor feels particularly insidious: the decline of local news.

Since 2005, 3,200 print newspapers have shuttered, with 130 disappearing last year alone. They continue to close at a rate of more than two per week, according to a new report from the Medill School at Northwestern University, and now almost 55 million people have little or no access to local news.

But on a Saturday afternoon last month, something unusual happened against the backdrop of so many newspaper deaths. In the halls of an old factory in Waltham, a packed crowd witnessed one being born.

“Our objective is really to bring nonpartisan news coverage back to the city, so all of us can become more engaged in civic and cultural life,” said June Kinoshita, a Waltham resident and one of the co-founders of The Waltham Times.

More than 120 people attended the community forum at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation to formally launch the non-profit news outlet. The Times has been publishing regularly on its website since September. It has hired a part-time journalist and several freelancers, and began publishing a weekly email newsletter that has 100 new people signing up each week, according to Kinoshita, a former editor at MIT Technology Review and Scientific American.

The goal is to hire a full time, professional editor and a handful of journalists that will be supported by volunteers doing marketing, IT and administrative work. The founders intend to raise money through donations, grants, memberships and local advertising.

The site does not have a paywall. By next fall, the team behind the new venture plans to begin sending a free weekly print edition to every household in Waltham.

The Waltham Times is the latest entry in an emerging sector of nonprofit local news outlets. Some two dozen Massachusetts communities are now home to citizen-led news enterprises aiming to fill the void left by the shuttering or hollowing out of community newspapers that once served as key pillars of the local civic infrastructure.

While Boston itself is flush with news outlets, including large organizations with big  budgets and staffs, from the Boston Globe to WBUR and GBH, in the metro area where nearly 5 million people live, there are fewer and fewer newsrooms dedicated to individual cities and towns.

A snapshot of data in Greater Boston from the Northwestern University report shows dozens of remaining local papers have been folded into Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, known for its cost-cutting measures, including laying off journalists.

News about Waltham can be sparse. As of December 11, Gannett-owned Wicked Local’s top story on the city was about a Waltham man’s arrest for threatening to blow up a Belmont woman’s home, published on November 20th.

Patch Media, a digital-only local news company, covers communities across the country, including Waltham. Waltham Patch has one editor for the city, and he also covers Framingham, Natick, Braintree, and all of Cape Cod. He lives in Rhode Island.

What happens when a city doesn’t have robust local news coverage?

Zach Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern’s Medill School, said the effects are profound.

“Voter participation and voter turnout that tends to decrease,” he said. “Incumbents tend to be re-elected more often and run unchallenged more often. Split ticket voting, where candidates are chosen across party lines disappears, and instead people just tend to vote along the party lines,” he said. “In the absence of local news,” Metzger said, “the national level politics and national level partisanship become local politics. And the sort of partisan divides that we’ve been seeing within our national politics, those start to influence local elections and local politics as well.”

Towards the end of The Waltham Times’s community forum, members of the audience were asked what stories they wanted covered. Immediately, hands shot up. Why did a freshman soccer team get cut? What’s happening to the tree canopy in the city? Why did it take three years to fix the bumps in the road, and where is all the tax money going?

In a moment where 36 percent of Americans have no trust in the media, The Waltham Times’s aim to bring high-quality, unbiased, community-focused coverage to the city is meaningful. At the launch event, Kinoshita, the co-founder, and her colleagues emphasized the importance of an objective, factual news source for the city, and the hunger for local news in the crowd was palpable.

I have no illusions that one local newspaper can heal the divisions in the country, unravel extremist movements, or convince an incoming president to reconsider his threats to  throw journalists in jail over coverage he doesn’t like.

But a more informed community with vigorous news coverage inevitably brings politics back to the local level, and gives more of us a common ground from which all of us can participate in democracy together.

While there are many reasons to despair, the birth of a new local newspaper gives me something I haven’t felt much of lately: hope.

Jesse Steinmetz is a freelance reporter and public radio producer in Waltham.