Healthy Local News and Information Ecosystems: Approaches To Go Deep
At the beginning of March, Impact Architects released a Healthy Local News and Information Report and accompanying Playbook. Our framework builds on a rich body of ecosystems assessments and research. Our goal was to put forth a framework grounded in research, that is generally applicable, and that relies on easily accessible and freely available data and information. But we recognize that meeting the dual goals of accessibility and generalizability means that our framework is but a starting point to set a baseline and hopefully help guide further deep community listening and learning, contextualization, and strategizing.
There are amazing people and organizations in the field with complementary approaches to information needs and ecosystem assessments. Here, we want to highlight and share some of these exciting approaches and potential partners to conduct further contextualized, nuanced, local news and information ecosystem assessments.
The Listening Post Collective, a project of Internews, partners with people and organizations to develop local news solutions that help communities thrive. LPC provides a Toolbox and Playbook that anyone can use to “listen and engage” with communities, and also works directly with newsrooms, foundations, and community based organizations to conduct information ecosystem assessments. LPC also provides support to partners interested in creating solutions around identified community needs.
Using these methods, LPC has conducted a number of information ecosystem assessments, including Fresno, CA, North Omaha, NE, Eureka, CA, Oakland, CA, Sonoma, CA and the Jersey Shore.
Listening Post Collective’s community listening process is built off of Internews’ pioneering Information Needs and Information Ecosystem Assessment methodologies. The process lays the groundwork for strong, equitable, and sustainable relationships between communities and their information providers, creating more inclusive, responsive, and trusted ecosystems with the community and its needs centered. And LPC’s approach is unique in that it provides seed funding to media start-ups that aim to meet the identified information gaps in a local ecosystem.
2. A guide to assessing your local news ecosystem by Fiona Morgan and Democracy Fund
Fiona Morgan worked with Democracy Fund to develop a guide that walks you through how to qualitatively assess and take action to improve the news ecosystems in your community. You can download the full guide and walk through the steps here.
The guide is created to inform grantmaking and collaboration. It defines an ecosystem, outlines community research and engagement tactics, walks through various elements of a media landscape, and prompts thinking and strategies for acting on your research findings. The guide is especially helpful in identifying which community stakeholders to include in interviews to add rich and specific local information to your understanding of the ecosystem you’re working in.
3. Place-Based Ecosystem Assessments
A number of organizations have undertaken local news and information ecosystem assessments in their own communities. In New Jersey, the Center for Cooperative Media (CCM) at Montclair State University has undertaken a project to granularly map all local news providers and local news ecosystems in the state.
The five-phase project includes a meta-literature review, and creating a database and map of information providers serving New Jersey (including those based across state lines in New York City and Philadelphia). The project has also produced a comparative analysis of the structural correlates of local news provision at the municipal level; content and audience analyses to understand “the reach and impact of the local news that serves New Jersey” are in progress. Though the project is ongoing, CCM has outlined some of their methods for building the map of local news outlets with databases and the difficult task of balancing depth and scale in ecosystem studies.
CCM’s work is a proof-of-concept for the value that a backbone institution can play in a local news and information ecosystem, from mapping to coordination to concrete support for newsrooms.
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IA’s healthy local news and information ecosystem playbook walks you through our methodology so that you can baseline your community’s news and information ecosystem through 35 indicators about the community, its information providers, and the relationship between the two. Understanding these elements however are just a starting point, and one method to approach an ecosystem assessment. Once you’ve created a baseline, you can make a plan based on what you’ve learned about your community, the resources and capacity available for investing in your ecosystem, and find the right approach — and right partner or partners — for your own context and goals.
