Local News & Information

Journalists tend to think of themselves as individual talents; driven by their own intrepid instincts, they find and uncover the stories of others. Instead, we should think of our work as one element within an interconnected ecosystem of social services.

I think there’s an opportunity to create something very substantial here in Manchester: a company that revives local journalism across the country and connects people via storytelling , a means of human communication that goes back much longer than the history of newspapers. As the popularity of American magazine-style journalism shows, people... See more

James Madison — a.k.a. Guy Who Wrote the First Amendment — argued that newspapers should have a massive subsidy from the federal government to encourage the distribution of newspapers. The “postal subsidy,” which provided discounted mail, would be about $46 billion in today’s dollars — bigger than the NASA budget.

In the absence of professional journalism—in so-called news deserts across the country—critical information systems are left to the algorithmic biases of a few social media giants. Dig further, though, and you’ll find block club newsletters, school newspapers, library workshops, public access broadcasts, grassroots community teach-ins, and... See more

All of this will tend to require that national actors— who sometimes like to act like every solution they offer is, almost definitionally, turnkey— become much better acquainted with the detailed operations of those they are seeking to help. And that will mean understanding that, at the operational level, almost every local newsroom is different,... See more

What I have learned in my years studying the role of journalism in civic discussion is that democracies are best served when media coverage focuses on issues that affect society and people’s everyday lives and minimizes “horse race” reporting that obsesses over who is ahead in opinion surveys or fundraising.

This new form of local journalism has some common characteristics:

• Provides news and information through accessible products that address information gaps.


• Organizes and trains community members, building inclusive pipelines for involvement in journalism and media as civic engagement.


• Relies on stakeholder engagement and audience feedback loops to

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