Building a new model for community-centered local news
What can we learn from community service providers to build the next model of local journalism?
The Fair Lawn Ambulance Corps in my hometown of Fair Lawn, New Jersey is an independent nonprofit supported in part by the municipal government. The corps signs up regular people to take free classes with regional EMS academies and commit to spending time responding to medical emergencies in their community.
Their membership also meets monthly for training, connection, and deliberation. They offer CPR classes to the public. They provide first aid at community events.
Some members pick up more shifts than others. Some go on to become nurses or doctors. Some have been in medicine for decades.
This kind of community service plays a critical role in connecting the public with more specialized service providers.
Who plays that critical connector role for news organizations today? Who’s answering local community needs? How are those first responders equipped? What’s not getting the specialized attention it needs? What public outcomes could we imagine if citizens’ basic civic information needs were met?
These are among the questions driving my year as a John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University. And I’ll be exploring them through the Community Info Coop’s public service journalism lab, the Bloomfield Information Project in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
A public funding model for public service local news
I launched the nonprofit Community Info Coop in 2018 to house the Info Districts Project, a public policy solution I have been working since 2016 to address the local news crisis.
The Bloomfield Information Project is an extension of the Info Districts Project and seeks to explore practical pathways to establishing community-run, publicly funded local news organizations.
Based on existing models of funding public goods, info districts call for the creation of special taxing districts to distribute the cost of local news production and link revenue to public service and community engagement.
Through a fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, I documented more than two years of research on how to establish special services districts for local news in a white paper titled “How to Launch an Info District.”
From its origins as a graduate school assignment at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, info districts have grown to become an internationally recognized model for addressing the well-documented crisis of trust and sustainability in local news.
According to a 2020 poll by Data for Progress, info districts are the leading public policy solution to the local news crisis in the United States compared to increasing federal support for local public media and pandemic relief assistance programs.
And of the three, info districts was the only solution supported by a bi-partisan and bi-racial majority of survey respondents.
In the U.S., the info districts model has sprouted organizing efforts in California, Colorado, and New Jersey, where the Community Info Coop commissioned a legal analysis to find pathways to establishing info districts in the state.
Info districts enable new, more participatory forms of media that address gaps in information and civic engagement with under-served communities.
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 lead their work.
City Bureau co-founder Darryl Holliday described this new form of local journalism in What Journalism Can Learn from Mutual Aid for Columbia Journalism Review:
…a new type of newsroom that serves as the nerve center for local information hubs by reflecting and connecting the people it serves, prioritizing lived experience and disavowing the notion of objective gatekeeping. These newsrooms will redistribute journalism skills away from selective and expensive higher-education programs and to the public. They will collaborate with nontraditional news sources to reduce a scarcity of resources exacerbated by competition. They will democratize the news industry by providing more access to decision-making processes. These newsrooms will do away with heroes and hierarchies by sharing the responsibility of shaping how news and information are created and distributed.
These new local news organizations build capacity instead of extracting wealth. They identify information needs, facilitate spaces for exchange, and supply the training and resources community members need to address their neighbors’ needs. In this way, they encourage news and information exchange in the public interest.
This model is key to restoring local news deserts and inspiring civic participation across the country, as Holliday would also note in Journalism is a public good. Let the public make it. He wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:
The solution to the current crisis in journalism isn’t simply to save jobs, but to willingly and intentionally democratize the means of journalistic production. New infrastructure that weaves together participatory media and public assets will democratize journalistic skills and could unlock a movement for collective action, a not-so-secret weapon against news deserts and misinformation hidden in plain sight. It relies on thousands of everyday people who are eager to participate, organizations with physical media-makerspaces, and communities taking collective action.
This new community-as-service-provider model has the potential to become the dominant form of local journalism in the 21st century. And public funding will be critical to its growth with info districts among various federal, state, and local funds that should be made available to sustain this new class of social service provider.
But we are now in the early stages of this transition. So how can local communities begin building towards that future today? What networks, workflows, technology, and programs do we need to move purposefully towards a grassroots public media ecosystem?
I launched the Bloomfield Information Project in 2020 to answer those questions.
Piloting a community-as-service-provider model
The Bloomfield Information Project is not funded by an info district, but we have received some public support through a grant from the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a state fund for local news and information. Our primary source of funding is philanthropy supplemented by individual donations.
We launched in March 2020 to meet an acute need for news and information in our community at the start of the pandemic. Our initial response reflected findings from listening conducted since 2017 through community meetings, social media monitoring, interviews, surveys, and ecosystem mapping.
At a 2019 listening session, we heard that news and information in town was “pieces here, pieces there,” with no single reliable source of information. So we created an ecosystem map to identify information stakeholders and assets to create feeds of news and information from approximately 150 sources in our community when the pandemic started. Those sources include businesses, social service providers, community groups, social media groups, and others.
Those feeds fed our community news wire, which in turn powered our COVID community dashboard, daily newsletter, and business directory. (This was before Google and Yelp started updating pandemic business information.)
Today, the news wire continues to feed our website, daily newsletter, SMS channel, and social media with pandemic information making up far less than it did at the height of the first wave of infections.
This curation workflow is something we call a “news harvest.” It allows us to amplify existing community production (Facebook groups, businesses, civic groups, parent associations, social service providers, local governments, etc.) and redistribute it to increase information equity in Bloomfield.
In this way, we’ve created a clearinghouse for local news and information that allows our community to bypass social media as a source of local news, makes information more discoverable through search, and increases access to resources and civic engagement.
This minimally viable news service is the foundation of the Bloomfield Information Project and the initial stage of our news ecosystem restoration process. It’s allowed us to build a movement for local news and civic engagement in our community. And it’s the first service we’re transitioning to community production.
Building for community production
In September 2021, the Bloomfield Information Project hired Bloomfield resident Nikki Villafane as a Civic Info Producer to produce our news harvest and the products it powers in the beginning of thesecond stage of our news ecosystem restoration process.
In time, the news harvest will be fully managed by a Civic Info Producer with content sourced through community production to meet community information needs.
This model enables us to connect additional community production modules to our central hub to meet a broader range of needs. We hired Essex County resident Olivia Rizzo to spearhead developing some of that infrastructure. And in 2022, we’ll launch our first community corps training to build toward these production modules:
Public meeting reporting
To address our local government accountability gaps, we’ll train and pay community members to document government meetings — inspired by City Bureau’s Documenters and its affiliate programs in Cleveland, Detroit, and Minneapolis.
Our public meeting reporters will enable the production of a “Meeting Brief” news product and will deploy for town council and school board meetings. Their notes will also feed our news wire.
In addition, we’re considering a “Public Comment Service” where we would collect and forward questions for elected officials akin to MuckRock’s FOIA Machine, allowing residents (and us) to track the responsiveness of local elected officials to public questions.
Profiles and explainers
Residents and community leaders have pointed to a lack of general knowledge about people, institutions, and events that have shaped our community and continue to influence its evolution. This lack of local context discourages civic participation and social progress while favoring incumbent power structures that leverage information vacuums to maintain their positions.
In response, we’ll train our community reporters to produce Q&A profiles and explainers published as news articles and entries in a community knowledge base. Inspired by projects like DavisWiki, our directory will serve as a growing guide to all-things-Bloomfield and be fed by our news wire.
Outreach and engagement
At a February 2021 listening session in partnership with Social Impact Studios on behalf of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, a Bloomfield resident shared their vision for a community liaison program:
I don’t know how this would work structurally but…I think asking for people to become ambassadors for their neighborhoods. One person can’t do it all. But there are enough communities in this town where if you ask people to step up…they would do it and they would have a sense of ownership and it wouldn’t seem too big. Because everybody’s got limited time. But if there was a structure for how to be an ambassador to Bloomfield, to your neighborhood, I think people would run with it.
So we’re exploring creating an ambassador track for our community corps to deepen our relationship with key communities — inspired by the work of Fiona Morgan at Branchhead Consulting with the American Journalism Project and Kristine Villanueva with Equally Informed Philly at Resolve Philly.
We’ve piloted some community corps workshops at Bloomfield College with the support of Jason Torreano, an adjunct journalism professor at the school. And we’re finalizing training curricula for our corps launch in summer 2022 in coordination with other stakeholders in the state.
Our next goal is to reach the third stage of our news ecosystem restoration process: establishing self-sustaining cycles of community production that feed each other. A Civic Info Producer that sees questions arise during the news harvest and fields inquiries through audience feedback to provide assignments to reporters. Ambassadors that collect perspectives to shape our services, help us develop pipelines, and let people know about our products. Seasoned producers, reporters, and ambassadors sharing their knowledge with more and more people to expand the breadth and depth of our network and services with training provided through schools, colleges, and public workshops.
Once established, this news ecosystem is ideally governed by a board elected by reader and producer members or the general public, if funded by an info district. This is the fourth stage of our news ecosystem restoration process — at least a few years away.
During the remaining months of my JSK Fellowship, the Bloomfield Information Project will continue to advance towards the third stage of our news ecosystem restoration process. And I’ll write about that as well as other projects this work intersects.
If you’re interested in following along, find me on Twitter @thensim0nsaid. And find my fellow JSK Fellows on this Twitter list.
Author’s note: There’s no such thing as your own idea. In addition to the people and organizations I mention above, I’d like to do my best to credit others who’ve inspired and supported my work. In no particular order, they include but are not limited to: Rebecca Noah, Mike Rispoli, Vanessa Maria Graber, Madeleine Bair, Brit Harley, Sara Alvarez, Candice Fortman, Andrea Wenzel, Jesse Hardman, Carolyn Powers, Andrew Devigal, Peggy Holman, Andrew Haeg, Chris Hardie, Nation Hahn, Joe Amditis, Jennifer Brandel, Elizabeth Hansen, Alicia Bell, Heather Bryant, Andre Natta, Andrew Losowsky, Ariel Zirulnick, Reuben Stern, Max Resnick, Brittany Mayes, Molly de Aguiar, Chris Horne, Ryan Pitts, Teresa Gorman, Meghan Van Dyk, Michelle Ferrier, Randy Picht, John Mooney, Ollyn Lettman, Maria Probst, Stefanie Murray, Todd Wolfson, Carrie Brown, Jeremy Caplan, Celeste LeCompte, Terry Parris Jr., Tracie Powell, and Mario Vasilescu as well as our peers at the NJ News Commons, LION Publishers, and Institute for Nonprofit News in addition to our awesome fiscal sponsor, Movement Alliance Project.
