Local News & Information

Dewey’s faith in the potential of institutions that treat democratic knowledge not as a problem to be managed but as a capacity to be cultivated is harder to carry right now. But the alternative is accepting Lippmann’s premises wholesale, conceding that the only question worth asking is who manages the herd and how.

Audience growth, however, has rarely been romantic.

“We’ve gotten really good at Meta lead ads,” Heafy said. “We can acquire subscribers for under a dollar.”

Despite Facebook’s declining cultural cachet, Heafy remains blunt about its effectiveness. The company uses paid acquisition as a baseline, comparing every other growth tactic against it.

The contract isn’t coming apart because people can’t access journalism, but because they increasingly don’t. People still want reliable, relevant information from sources independent of those in power in business and government. In fact, mountains of research suggest that people appreciate the ideal aspirations of journalism, and want news that... See more

Before the Watergate era, many journalists did not have college degrees. They were just smart people who knew how to get information. They were naturals at talking to people. And they knew enough about how things worked to recognize news.

“We realized it’s almost better to empower a single editor in each market,” Heafy said, “and centralize the rest of the operations.”

Behind that shift was something few media startups bother to build: a literal playbook. Heafy described a printed manual, four to five inches thick, that detailed every step of launching and operating a local... See more

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.