It's come to this?

In a sad but apt statement of the current state of newspapers, two of the three stories in The (Columbia, S.C.) State's Metro section on Labor Day were hardly metro - but were from papers in Myrtle Beach and Charleston. The third was a Q and A by the news columnist.

In fact, taking the front page as well, three of the six lead stories were from other papers, including one about college building projects done by the Greenville News but that should have been easy pickings for the Columbia paper that sits in the shadow of the University of South Carolina.

I'm glad to see S.C. papers sharing and giving light to some good stories that in the past were largely ignored or had to be sanitized by the AP before they were picked up (except for a few years when Columbia and Greenville were going at it, and so Columbia had a content-sharing arrangement with the Spartanburg daily paper, part of the Upstate metro region). But this is still a sad commentary in the state's largest paper.