> Most small town papers are filled with verbatim Reuters reports.
Not exactly. It's mostly AP reports, not Reuters, covering stuff from outside that small paper's area. If there's a flood of national interest in that small town, it's probably one of the reporters from that paper that will write the national wire story.
That's kind of the point of the Associated Press, lots of small local organizations banding together to offer comprehensive local/national/international coverage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press:
> Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. The AP traditionally employed the "inverted pyramid" formula for writing, a method that enables news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essentials, although in 2007, then-AP President Tom Curley called the practice "dead".[6]