Episode 1: Reimagining Local News
Across the country, a transformation is underway. While headlines dwell on the decline of local news, newsrooms and journalists are rewriting the story by reimagining how local news can serve, inform, and connect our communities.
“We live in a communication desert,” wrote journalist Laura S. Washington in 2011 while examining the “paradox of our media age:” that while we are drowning in particular kinds of content, “our cities are parched for information and news coverage with context and quality.”
This is considered to have been the origin of the term “news deserts,” which the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina now defines as a “community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”
These news deserts have multiplied at a startling rate as the news industry has contracted. However, against this dire backdrop, new, innovative news ventures have proliferated along with the shoring efforts of community groups, policy leaders, and philanthropy.
One of those philanthropic responses has been the creation of Press Forward, a national coalition that has invested more than $400 million to strengthen local newsrooms, close longstanding gaps in journalism coverage, advance public policy that expands access to local news, and scale the infrastructure the sector needs to thrive.
“It’s Like When You Don’t Have Water: You Really Can’t Live.”
All of these efforts are, in some way, attempting to reimagine what local news can and should be. The ultimate goal is to develop a new architecture for community news that is not only resilient and sustainable but also sufficiently flexible to accommodate evolution and innovation.
“We live in a communication desert… our cities are parched for information and news coverage with context and quality.”
The purpose of this project, Reimagining Local News, is to illuminate the ways in which communities are being impacted by both the contraction of news and the introduction of new news sources. This project aims to highlight the people involved, the news consumers, and the brave news entrepreneurs charting a new path for local news.
This is an attempt to push beyond the numbers and statistics. This crisis is a human crisis. And its solutions are also human. Here, will see their faces and hear their stories.
We will travel from a news desert in Louisiana to an upstart newsroom in Chicago, focused on community news, and then to Denver, where community stakeholders banded together when the leading newspaper in the state was threatened. We will hear from the founders of local news operations that specifically focus on underserved communities, policymakers working on governmental responses, and members of university programs that are helping to fill some of the gaps in local news coverage.
And we will hear from members of the communities themselves, who crave more local news options and have warmly received new ventures that are striving to fill the void.
Part of what the project highlights is the necessary shift in perspective: changing the focus from rescuing a battering industry to supporting a public good. It is a recognition that one of the crucial functions of local news is community cohesion.
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A 2019 study found that “the decline of local newspapers and the ‘nationalization’ of political news are polarizing vote choice.” But, just as important are what I will call “soft cohesion content:” the death notice that tells you a neighbor was a veteran, the wedding announcement that reveals a bride’s collegiate accolades, and a high school baseball recap that cheers the local team’s advance to the state championships. It is in this community reporting that communities connect.
That level of community journalism has to survive for our communities to survive as we understand them.
As Dale R. Anglin, executive director of Press Forward, put it, we assumed that local news would always be because it had always been, “but it turns out, when you don’t have it, it’s like when you don’t have water: you really can’t live.”