Local Voices on Local News

This Community Information Needs Assessment was built on extensive and careful listening. California Common Cause helped facilitate 12 focus groups in English, Spanish, Cantonese, and Tagalog, in partnership with community-based organizations, and had over a dozen conversations with community news publishers.

Are You Listening?

Hardman discusses early experiences that shaped his approach, including the importance of deeply listening to communities and collaborating to meet their information needs. He outlines the development of the Listening Post Collective and its Civic Media Playbook, emphasizing strategies for establishing trust and engaging communities in creating media that reflects their voices and priorities.

How community listening can help shape election-year coverage

API’s discusses the significant impact of community listening on shaping election-year coverage. It highlights the importance of engaging with the community to understand their information needs, concerns, and the political stories that resonate with them. By conducting listening projects, newsrooms can set their coverage agenda based on real community priorities rather than politicians’ narratives, discover gaps in public understanding, and build trust with their audience.

Community-Centered Outlets Empower and Inform Latinos

This CJR article explores the significant role of Community-Centered Ethnic Media Outlets (CCEMOs) in empowering and informing Latino communities amid the rise of misinformation. Highlighting the limitations of mainstream Spanish-language media in countering misinformation, the piece details a study showing that exposure to CCEMOs like El Tímpano and Enlace Latino NC increases political engagement and knowledge among Latinos.

The Roadmap for Local News: An Emergent Approach To Meeting Civic Information Needs

The opportunity now is to shepherd and accelerate a transition to an emergent civic media system. This new ecosystem looks different from what it will replace: while the commercial market rewarded information monopolies, what is emerging now are pluralistic networks in which information is fluid, services are shared, and media is made in cooperation with the people it seeks to serve.

The Growing Strength of Public Media Local Journalism

The growth of public media is underscored by the increasing financial strength of local public radio organizations, with news-focused licensees experiencing a steady rise in revenue, primarily supported by individual giving and underwriting. The donor base for public radio has expanded significantly, with an increasing number of sustainers and major donors, indicating a robust financial future.

Building Community Power: A newsroom’s guide to equitable engagement

This step-by-step guide by Alicia Bell and Mike Rispoli can help newsrooms examine their own power and design engagement strategies that don’t perpetuate transactional or extractive relationships with the public. To foster a new future for journalism, it’s crucial for news outlets to share and build power with local communities. Check out the related Gather Lighting Chat and News Voices post.

Cross-field collaboration: How and why journalists and civil society organizations around the world are working together

Increasingly impatient with a lack of impact from investigative projects, journalists have become more willing to partner with civil society organizations, many of whose reason for being is making change. With the drive for impact comes complicated ethical questions that the journalists wrestle with, but have found ways to negotiate.

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