Sam Liebeskind

Ken Doctor’s media brand Lookout in Santa Cruz and Eugene, Oregon uses AI to automate the assembly of hyperlocal neighborhood newsletters from public data sources like permits, roadwork, inspections, crime reports, weather, and events. But Lookout is more than a local news outlet. It is a platform for solving local problems together with the... See more

Fast-forward to the near future: AI has the potential to change the fundamentals of local news. In 2026, the news organizations that thrive will stop thinking of themselves as publishers and start operating as community information utilities. They won’t just report on the school board meeting. They will show you when it happens, let you search past... See more

Six years later, Jeff Jarvis wrote a frustrated post on his blog Buzz Machine. Hurricane Sandy had just devastated his New Jersey neighborhood. He needed to know which streets were passable, where power crews were actually working, which gas stations had fuel. His local news outlet published stories about the devastation but left the community on... See more

In 2026, journalism’s theory of change will be reinvented by practitioners exploring what service means beyond the article. For The Jersey Bee, that means newsletters, directories, guides, zines, text messages, resource fairs, comedy shows, and community media training — in addition to narrative reporting.

Now in our fifth year, The Bee envisions... See more

My first conclusion is that we need to create experiences that cultivate a sense of agency an efficacy which will not happen in the classroom reading old books or econ papers. For me this has meant getting students to teach others and see what it’s like to give people new knowledge that has facilitates action. That teaches efficacy. It has also... See more

Top feeds heavily skew towards English content, although there were five Japanese,

four Portuguese, and a single feed each for Indonesian, Ukrainian, and Spanish. The

relative prominence of Japanese and Portuguese reflects the geographic distribution of

the platform’s users (Duarte, 2025). In terms of topic, identity-focused feeds were most

prominent,... See more

Bluesky’s approach to curation is based on the idea that people “must have control over

our algorithms if we’re going to trust in our online spaces” (The Bluesky Team, 2022).

The platform’s support for custom feeds supports this mission, offering “essentially a

farmers’ market of algorithms” (Graber quoted in SXSW, 2025, 54:18). Yet custom feeds

exist... See more