Advocates Explore Ways to Strengthen Local News in a Time of Crisis

Amid the fears and threats that many are facing in this political moment, people need information about what’s happening in their communities to stay safe.

Long before Trump was inaugurated in January, the ailing journalism landscape struggled to provide communities with the information they need to stay connected and informed. But the first months of the second Trump administration have laid bare how dire the situation is. Amid cuts to key federal services, skyrocketing costs and threats of mass deportations, people are having trouble finding accurate, timely information about risks facing their communities — and about the local support networks they can turn to for assistance and solidarity.

The legacy commercial-media system is faltering, weakened by decades of corporate consolidation and economic disruption. But thanks to the hard work of journalists and community leaders, an emerging civic-media movement is stepping into the vacuum to chart a new path for local journalism that puts community needs first.

That’s why Free Press Action and its partners in the Media Power Collaborative hosted a panel discussion on March 14 with community-rooted journalists, academics and civic-media practitioners about how people are accessing information during this time of uncertainty and fear. We spoke about the critical needs people are experiencing right now, outlined how public-interest journalism can address those needs and lifted up calls for policies that support journalism as a public good. The event came shortly after the release of Local News for the People: A Policy Agenda for Meeting Civic-Information Needs.

The conversation brought together four incredible speakers from across the civic-media field. Mazin Sidahmed is the co-founder of Documented, a nonprofit newsroom that serves immigrant communities in New York City. Kate Harloe is a journalist and member of the Freelance Solidarity Project and the National Writers Union. Carla Murphy is a journalist, media organizer and assistant professor at Rutgers University-Newark. Candice Fortman is the former executive director of Outlier Media and a John S. Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford. Together, these leaders reflected on the challenges communities are facing to access reliable information in an uncertain time, and the need for collaboration, organizing, and policy change to build toward a transformed media landscape in the future.

Keeping immigrant communities safe and informed

Amid the Trump administration’s severe crackdown on immigrants, Sidahmed reflected on the information people are seeking to protect themselves and their communities. “The main issue we’re experiencing right now is deep confusion,” he said. “Every week, we’re addressing hundreds of questions around, ‘Am I eligible for deportation?’”

This is by design, Sidahmed explained, and reporters at Documented are working hard to help communities distinguish misinformation that creates panic from the kind of accurate information people need to stay safe. “We’re navigating a lot of well-meaning people trying to spread awareness about ICE activity in NYC, which causes incredible alarm throughout the community,” he said. “How do we, as a news source, let people know that a lot of the threats they’re hearing about are not coming to fruition, while balancing that with the real threats there are from the administration?”

Documented’s reporters invest extensive time in building trust with the communities they serve so people will know they can rely on the information they’re receiving. Still, it’s hard to respond to the sheer scale and speed of the administration’s policies. Community-centered news outlets contend with limited funding and are facing rising threats to freedom of the press and free speech.

“What will it look like if the very work we do becomes illegal?” Sidahmed said. “That’s not a question of resources. That’s a question of organizing, strategizing and coming up with a new vision of how we’re going to combat what we’re facing.”

Building solidarity with journalists and media workers

Important organizing work is taking place among both journalists and news outlets — and at the community level as people make demands for the news and information they deserve.

Harloe spoke about a community-listening tour she participated in with New York Focus, one of the few nonprofit investigative-news outlets that serves all of New York State.

“We’re in a moment where we’re hearing a lot about the death of local news and the collapse of the news industry,” said Harloe. “But we can lose the fact that people have demands, they often have highly developed critiques of local news, and they don’t have a lot of ways to communicate that feedback to the organizations producing the news.”

Harloe spoke about the connections between the needs of community members and those of working journalists, and the importance of fighting together for a better media system. She saw news outlets respond to this need by forming the New York Public News Network, a collaborative effort to share stories, coordinate coverage and share resources.

“Even traditional legacy newsrooms are picking up the language and methods that the civic-media movement has helped birth in a lot of ways,” Harloe said. “We’re seeing newsrooms partner with public libraries, use text-messaging services to communicate with readers — all sorts of things.”

Collaborating with public universities and educational institutions

It’s essential to have these kinds of partnerships between newsrooms and the public-education system so people can access training and tools to understand the news they’re reading. Even as they face growing threats to federal funding and free speech, public universities and community colleges play an important role in strengthening public access to civic media and information.

Murphy spoke about the need for partnerships between journalists and public universities to promote digital media literacy and civics education.

“I can’t teach journalism if students don’t already have that,” Murphy said. “It’s across all ages. A lot of our electorate has not been educated to keep up with the technological changes that have happened over the last 20 years, and most of us see the ramifications of that.”

Like the reporters at Documented, Murphy said trust plays a key role in media-literacy education. “This work has to be culturally relevant and culturally competent to be effective. Whoever the instructor is, they have to be of the community and sensitive to what the community is talking about. Before they listen to what I have to say, I have to earn their trust.”

Advocating for a transformed media system

University professors and students, like newsrooms, are facing existential threats to their civil liberties. Repressive measures have included the detention of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and the arrest of a Stanford University student journalist for covering pro-Palestine protests. These crackdowns have raised new questions about the urgent need to envision a transformed future far beyond what we have imagined.

“We have a chance to tear a bunch of things down that no longer work,” said Fortman. “The federal government has failed many communities many times over in this country. So we are not living in a time that we haven’t seen before; we’re living in a time that many people have never seen before.”

As part of this broader need for systemic change, panelists spoke about the need to advocate for policy change to support local news and civic information — and discussed the challenge this poses to traditional notions of journalistic objectivity.

“Journalism is always advocating for something or someone,” Fortman said. When articles focus on holding leaders accountable, that is considered advocacy, Fortman said. Yet when media coverage promotes corporate interests, it’s considered objective journalism.

All of this requires us to reexamine the role that journalists, media-makers and community members must play to demand local news that serves their needs. Powerful leaders like those who spoke during this panel discussion have helped advance civic media in public universities, news outlets and underserved communities across the country. But these leaders also know that addressing the problems facing the news ecosystem calls for the kind of structural change that can only be accomplished by passing policies that fund and strengthen civic media.

This includes working at the state level to pass policies that fund journalism and information as public goods. The Media Power Collaborative is one space where journalists, academics and organizers are working together to advocate for policies that support civic media across the country — and Local News for the People charts a vision for the future we need to build toward as we strengthen coalitions and strategize a path to get there.

“I have to do my work in the moment, but I have to do my dreaming and building into the future,” Fortman said. “[The future] is going to come, whether you’re prepared for it or not.” 

Watch the discussion:

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