Local News is the Heartbeat of America, Serves Diverse Communities, but Faces Many Obstacles
How do understand the stance that local officials and candidates for office take on matters that impact your family and your neighborhood? How do prepare on the issues when voting? How do you become aware of physical safety issues and environmental impacts in your area? How do you support local businesses so that services and products in your vicinity can improve your quality of life? Local news. It is the heartbeat of the nation.
Just as journalism is under attack at the global level, Local news is being decimated by reliance on social media, partisan news sources, and nationally focused news outlets who cover the big issues. Local news purveyors struggle to make ends meet at a level that is consistent with good and responsible reporting. When this happens, many wind up shutting down operations. This is not good news for the people, especially those of diverse backgrounds whose voices would not otherwise be heard. Local news represents local viewpoints that matter – and enrich or enhance people’s lives – or at least give them the opportunity to raise their voice and potentially alter their fate.
This section covers the sad stories of news organization not being able to carry out their missions and the impact that has on the local level. News needs your support not only at the national level, but down to local and community sources trying to make a difference.
We’ve heard from nearly 5,000 residents in eight local markets across the country about their experience with journalism in their communities and what kinds of local information would be most useful to them.
KQED's Alexis Madrigal interviews John Palfrey, president of the MacArthur Foundation, one of the most influential funders of media and journalism. Press Forward is a new initiative aimed at stimulating large-scale philanthropic support for journalism.
If Americans are to continue receiving the benefits of local journalism—transparency, fact-checking, professional editing, and high-quality and timely reporting that promotes vibrant, cohesive, and diversecommunities—local news needs help to survive the current economic storm.
Our current media ecosystem produces too little high-quality information; we have a tendency to be attracted to information that confirms our existing biases about the world and to share this information with little regard for its veracity; and there are an increasing number of actors who seek to leverage these observations to distort public discourse and to undermine democratic decision-making.
At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people...
The foundations of local journalism are crumbling, as this newsletter seeks to explain each week; over the past few years, as the US has faced voter suppression, foreign meddling, and executive overreach—and as political polarization charges the atmosphere around the world—the foundations of a democratic government can also seem precarious. In April 2019, the Pew...
Local News as a critical component to DEI
TA summary of API's Inclusion Index work in Pittsburgh, starting with the cohort’s inclusion scores and ending with recommendations for effective ways they can work as a whole to improve the Pittsburgh media ecosystem.
As the economics of journalism continue to evolve, a defining question about the future is whether the news media can create content that consumers are willing to pay for or donate to directly. Central to answering that question is understanding the behavior of what many publishers call the next generation of news audiences, those Americans...
What many often do not realize is that certain tropes that are particularly magnified and have been circulating for a long time... In some ways, this can make the misinformation even more dangerous as average people help racist falsehoods go viral on social media, particularly in smaller, niche platforms with less content moderation oversight. However, stakeholders can watch to see these narratives re-emerging and proactively intervene.
This report, co-authored with TrollBusters, provides a clear examination of the professional dangers of being a female journalist in the news media today. Against a global backdrop that has changed significantly in the past five years both politically and digitally, this report provides an update...