What the heck does the same source material have to do with it? It has absolutely no bearing on what was being discussed. What was being discussed was that there wasn't a single papers that has discussed an ownership group interested in returning the ECHL to Manchester. There were at least 20 that discussed the Monarchs ceasing operations, it would stand to reason that there should be at least 4-5 that would discuss an interested ownership group returning the ECHL to Manchester. I didn't look overtly hard, but there hasn't been any news from any of the 20 or so papers that discussed. Having the same source material is absolutely irrelevant to what was being discussed.
I think what was intended was that those 20 papers didn't do separate investigations into the Monarch's situation. They saw the first article that was printed and they either reprinted it, or called the people who were quoted in the first article and re-interviewed them. There is a difference between having 20 media outlets actively interested in Manchester hockey and having one actively paying attention and 19 others repeating what the first one said. Someone has to break the story first to get the others interested, and there is likely only one or two who would do that.
I don't know about Manchester at all, but lots of other cities have had their newspapers cut staff, or were sold and merged, or even closed altogether. Reading's newspaper is no longer headquartered or printed in Reading. It was bought by a media conglomerate and they centralized operations between several cities, with operations of all the papers at one office/publishing facility. They are slowly losing the local focus and publishing more national and regional news. Less "boots on the ground" locally to pick up on these type of stories. If they hear about a rumored change in ownership they would do a story, but they might not hear about it as early in the process any more. Once they publish the story, they would probably also put it in the sports section of the newspapers they own in the surrounding counties, and maybe also in Wheeling, Worcester, Portland, and other ECHL cities. Hence 20 stories show up, but it was only one reporter who was actually responsible for all of it.
