Local News & Information
The relationship between journalism and the people it aims to serve is broken. But we can heal it if we learn to put audiences and communities at the centre of everything we do. The News Alchemists newsletter wants to help you to do just that.
News Alchemists #20: "Why create a need when you can meet a need?"

Midcoast Villager (Maine) - like Marfa / Big Bend Sentinal, running an IRL coffee shop as a community hub

Simon Galperin
Local journalism shouldn’t just close gaps. It should help residents understand how to show up better at public meetings. When people know the backstory, civic participation closes the loop.
Yoni Greenbaum • The Sebastopol Protocol: A New Local News Stress Test
Greater exposure to higher-quality local news leads to more political participation (Shaker, 2014), reduced polarization (Darr, Hitt and Dunaway, 2021, 2018; Moskowitz, 2021), less corporate malfeasance (Heese, Pérez-Cavazos and Peter, 2022), healthier municipal finances (Gao, Lee and Murphy, 2020), and increased political competition (Rubado and... See more
We asked 5,000 people across the country what they want from local news. Here’s what we learned. - American Journalism Project
theajp.orgRegional differences in culture, resources, and context make it difficult to design AI systems that address locally specific concerns (Hsu et al., 2022). The hyperlocal knowledge and values that define a community are hard for nonlocals, such as Report for America-style outsider journalists, to understand (Wenzel et al., 2020). Even when trying to... See more