Media Policy for an Informed Citizenry: Revisiting the Information Needs of Communities for Democracy in Crisis

Abstract

This volume of The ANNALS revisits and updates a call made by scholars in the early 2010s for public policy to respond to the market failure of local news. Organized into four parts—policy, supply, demand, and adaptation—this volume is committed to the proposition that people need information about their communities in order to navigate everyday life, and that those information needs are inextricably intertwined with other basic necessities like sustenance, transportation, housing, health, and safety. However, local and regional newspapers face an existential threat to their continued economic survival that undermines their ability to do even basic, routine coverage of civic institutions and communities. This volume demonstrates that professional journalism is one of many ways to support communities’ information needs. We consider how new sources of news and information might fill contemporary information needs and how media policy, broadly understood, could help create a more equitable, tolerant, and just multiracial democracy.

Local newspapers have long played a critical role in American public life, far beyond their ability just to keep people informed about their communities and the wider world: they provide a cultural glue to knit strangers together through a shared, common narrative about the place in which they live. While far from perfect and, in some cases, deserving of blame for inciting racial violence (Torres and Watson, this volume), newspapers nonetheless continue to be the single biggest source of geographically specific, originally reported news and information for American communities (Mahone et al. 2019). Today, the regular provision of professionally produced local news in many communities is in existential crisis: more than 1,800 communities may lack any regular access to local news and are so-called “news deserts,” while current estimates suggest that we are losing on average about two weekly newspapers a week across the U.S. (Abernathy 2022).

The crisis in traditional local journalism is probably not news to anyone reading this volume. The concern over this steep drop is widespread, and there is a bipartisan recognition that Americans are worse off without a local watchdog. In March 2023, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) cosponsored the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (2023), with the aim of better supporting local newspapers—what Kennedy called “the heart and soul of journalism” (Klobuchar 2023). It is far less clear, however, what the solutions might be. A wide variety of efforts have emerged to outsmart the commercial ad-supported foundation of the American news industry, from nonprofit digital-first news organizations to for-profit digital paywalls, membership models, and beyond. However, these efforts at financial sustainability and solvency are stopgaps that fail to adequately consider the larger structural changes that must take place if Americans are to have access to the news and information they need, not just to make sense of politics but also to orient their day-to-day lives. Moreover, given the sharp declines in trust in journalism, especially among Republicans, as well as growing problems with digital misinformation, we can no longer take for granted that Americans will even encounter reliable, accurate, and verifiable sources of news and information.

This volume of The ANNALS recharges and refreshes a call made by scholars in the early 2010s, and it aims to consider the ways that public policy, and more specifically media policy, ought to respond to the market failure of local news. More than a decade has passed since the Working Group on the Information Needs of Communities published its Report for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in July 2011, which bemoaned the “serious problems” caused by a “shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting” (Waldman and Working Group on Information Needs of Communities 2011, 345). Taking a broad view, the report sounded an alarm that is familiar to the researchers, policymakers, foundations, advocacy organizations, and journalists concerned about the future of the American news media and democracy: local journalism was quickly eroding, leaving many communities without meaningful access to regular news and information about where they lived.

A follow-up study was commissioned, and in 2012, a team led by authors (Friedland et al. 2012) assembled a comprehensive set of relevant social scientific research at the time, giving future authors both a framework upon which to build and a better understanding of the deficiencies in the literature. This literature review pushed beyond local journalism to consider critical information needs, or “those forms of information that are necessary for citizens and community members to live safe and healthy lives; have full access to educational, employment, and business opportunities; and to fully participate in the civic and democratic lives of their communities should they choose” (Friedland et al. 2012, 5).

Contributors to the research project from 2012, one of whom is an editor of this volume (Napoli) and another of whom sets the context for our reappraisal here (Friedland), could not have foreseen other changes that would further undermine the stability not just of the American news media but of American democracy as a whole. Here, we point to developments over the past decade, such as the rise of social media and the destabilizing effect these platforms have had on local news and information ecosystems, as well as the rise of what have been termed “pink slime” news networks that fill the void left by traditional local news sources with partisan pay-for-play journalism that typically traffics in algorithmically generated news stories and (un)healthy doses of misinformation.

The 10-year anniversaries of the FCC reports, as well as the current market failure of local newspaper journalism, provide the inspiration for our provocation: What have we learned over the past decade about how local news and information ecosystems have evolved and how they meet communities’ information needs? What blind spots still exist in our understanding of these ecosystems? What types of policy interventions should be pursued in light of what we know at this point? This volume is a starting point for answering some of these questions: our contributions are structured around policy, news supply and demand, and adaptations in the local news and information environments.

The 2011 FCC Report on the Information Needs of Communities was published at what we now know was only the beginning of the crisis, and it could be forgotten as a document whose policy recommendations crashed on the shores of politics and bureaucracy and spoke to now-outdated problems. However, this volume of The ANNALS is dedicated to the idea that the report still provides a useful lens to understanding the changes in local news in the decade since its publication. We have assembled a collection of journalists, media industry executives, policymakers, and academics from an interdisciplinary range of the social sciences to update our understanding of critical information needs and how they are being met. By looking at the current crisis in local journalism through a variety of perspectives on the Working Group’s findings, we hope to contribute to actionable ideas for media policymaking that prioritizes the information needs of communities ahead of politics or news industry profits.

Critical Information Needs

As the crisis in local information and journalism deepened over the past decade, more and more research piled up about what American civic life might be losing. It is ironically and unfortunately easier to discover the civic benefits of local news during a time of closures, consolidations, shrinking staffs, and increasing prominence of national and partisan media. The accompanying literature review to the Information Needs of Communities Report, led by authors (Friedland et al. 2012), assembled a comprehensive set of relevant social scientific research. The diagnosis of the problems at hand and the shift from thinking about news strictly as the news media helped lay the groundwork for 10 years of scholarship that has focused on local news and information “ecosystems” (Anderson 2013). This work also was a corrective to scholarship that had long prioritized the supply and the consumption of political news above all else; rather, the concept of “critical information needs,” both for individuals and communities, went beyond just politics to include news and information about emergencies and risks, health and welfare, education, transportation, economic opportunities, the environment, civic information, and political information.

However, this was never intended to be a final list of categories. The FCC report’s policy recommendations were underwhelming—for example, requiring broadcasters to make their public inspection file available online, or increasing governmental advertising expenditures—and failed to prompt meaningful regulatory or policy interventions. These modest FCC initiatives spurred partisan bickering about government interference in journalism, which undermined progress toward the recommended policy and institutional changes and even put a halt to further federal research initiatives (Pai 2014).

In the decade after the report was published, the FCC largely failed to act on its recommendations due to a combination of regular partisan gridlock, industry resistance, and a rapid politicization of Americans’ trust in journalism (what Chan calls “the lost decade” in this volume). These conflicts highlighted the fundamental tension inherent in U.S. media policy. As a field of public policy, media policy focuses on the structure and performance of media systems, with a key underlying goal being the cultivation of an informed citizenry (see Napoli, this volume). Media policy is a slippery term: it includes the regulatory authority of the FCC, but it extends well beyond those boundaries to include all of the ways in which federal, local, and state governments employ their legal authority and regulatory power to shape both commercial and public media in the U.S. It encompasses efforts like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act noted above, as well as interventions at the state level (see Mahone, this volume), such as the auction of broadcast spectrum in New Jersey, funding and education initiatives that support broadband deployment and adoption, and even the introduction of tax credits that encourage spending on local journalism (something that many states are considering). At the same time, of course, the strong First Amendment tradition in the U.S. presents an obstacle to many potentially beneficial policy initiatives. Under congressional pressure, the FCC not only backed away from any policy initiatives directed at strengthening local news and information ecosystems but even canceled planned research that would have examined the nature of the problem in a select number of local communities (Napoli and Friedland 2016).

These intervening years saw an almost cartoonish exaggeration of the trends that we were supposed to worry about in 2011: consolidation of ownership, delocalization of internet news, and the spread of unedited and unregulated misinformation through online networks. The first piece of evidence in the FCC report’s executive summary—the decline of newspaper newsroom employment by roughly 13,000 jobs from 2007 to 2012—now seems quaint. Newspaper newsroom jobs dropped 57 percent, from 71,000 jobs in 2008 to just under 31,000 in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center (Walker 2021). Today’s workforce represents a loss of roughly 40 percent of the total newspaper journalists in America relative to 2012, when the report told us we were in a crisis, and a nearly 60 percent drop since the peak of newspaper employment in 2006.

The report’s “overriding premise” that “the First Amendment circumscribes the role government can play in improving local news” (Waldman and Working Group on Information Needs of Communities 2011, 6) was only partially right: government’s role was indeed circumscribed, but it was also unable to stop the downward spiral of traditional local journalism because of politics and bureaucratic resistance, not inalienable rights. The problem of the hollowing out of local journalism was left to the journalism community to try to solve on its own, with help from a select few foundations who recognized the longer-term implications of the problem at hand.

The Present Context

Recent research is clear that good local news makes government work better, and this research is a major part of the case for media policy interventions. By observing elected officials and businesses, local media can not only uncover corruption after it has happened but also encourage politicians to behave as though they are being watched (Zaller 2003). Since the FCC report was published, the study of local news decline and its effects received more support in academia and from civically minded foundations and interest groups. Several major academic centers regularly produce reports and research detailing the grave threats facing the industry and quantifying its losses, and legacy media often amplify these findings to sound the alarm about local news decline. Civic-focused groups from the Brookings Institution to the League of Women Voters of Washington have also taken up the task of assembling the growing evidence about local media’s challenges and calling for action. Later scholarship by Napoli and Mahone in 2019 confirmed the importance of local newspapers, as newspapers continue to overperform other outlets in terms of original reporting (Mahone et al. 2019).

These efforts to document the decline of local news media often center on the robust evidence for the civic goods provided by stronger local media environments, and that work has, in turn, encouraged these civic-minded organizations to put this evidence in one place. One of the best collections of research on local news is compiled by Democracy Fund, called simply, “How We Know Journalism Is Good for Democracy” (Stearns and Schmidt 2022). This comprehensive resource compiles research on benefits for turnout, fairness, polarization, corruption, community identity, and disaster response, as well as offering a thorough look at the historical harms of local news for minority communities. This literature review, in addition to being impressively thorough, stands out for another reason: of the 56 articles or books that it names, 48 were published after the FCC Information Needs Report. This increase in the pace of local news scholarship should also encourage us to reckon with its findings once again: we know more about how local news matters than we ever have.

Local identity and community building are intimately connected as well. Engaging with the community is made easier by a common source of community information. If that source of local reporting and storytelling goes away, people are lonelier and more politically divided. One underdiscussed aspect of the decline of local news is the simultaneous rise of national news, which is easier than ever to receive through 24-hour cable news, social media, and online newspaper subscriptions. In addition, research has shown us that national (or even large-market) journalism has some inherent competitive advantages over local, community-focused journalism, based on factors such as larger production budgets, which in turn lead to advantages such as higher-quality writing, more appealing on-air talent, and the ability to make greater investments in reporting (George and Waldfogel 2006; Hopkins 2018). These advantages can make journalism produced by national news organizations inherently more appealing than local journalism for some news consumers.

This national news, which features partisan conflict and gridlock, tends to be more polarizing than local news, which emphasizes cross-cutting partisan identities. As the harms done by local news have received more attention over the past decade, many scholars and media commentators have been placed in the awkward position of advocating for both sustainability and reform. While there is an admirable focus on the particular challenges of local news for historically disadvantaged minority communities in the FCC Information Needs Report, more recent media initiatives such as Media 2070 and the University of Maryland’s “Printing Hate” project have demonstrated that the harms caused by local media were not only from neglect, but from active reinforcement of social orders based in white supremacy. Far from disinterested neglect, local newspapers have been complicit in economic and social redlining. Historically, local journalism reinforced existing inequalities by supplying more and higher-quality information to wealthier, whiter areas compared to diverse or poorer communities, an inequity likely only to worsen as news outlets increasingly depend on reader revenue (Usher 2021).

This Volume: Reassessing Community Information Needs and Policymaking

Thanks to the support of the Social Science Research Council’s Media and Democracy program, contributors were able to come together for an extensive workshop for peer review, an experience that honed our contributions and sharpened our suggested interventions. We have organized this volume into four parts: policy, supply, demand, and adaptation. First, our contributors update the definitions, venues, and advocates for media policy today, given the preceding decade of inaction from the FCC. We start with the same principle as the report: that communities have information needs that media may serve, primarily if not exclusively in many contexts. These needs help people live their everyday lives, particularly within America’s federalized political and policymaking system, as Lewis A. Friedland argues in “Taking It to the States: The Origins of Critical Information Needs.” As for the original drafters of the critical information needs framework and FCC study, Friedland provides context for why shifts in media policy languished—in part because to acknowledge a failure in providing local news and information would be a rebuke to the commercial news media system as a whole. National communications policy, however, grew in impact as global technological platforms increasingly served as the means for delivering news. In “What Is Media Policy?” Philip M. Napoli presents an explanation of what media policy actually means and how it might be implemented at the federal level. He also makes the case that media policy and tech policy are inextricably linked, given the role of platforms in facilitating the sharing of news and information and the role big tech has played in disrupting the advertising-based business model journalism has relied on for centuries.

As the means for transmitting information continually change, so do the lobbying forces working within government to define policies in ways that favor their industry. Communications policy was largely stymied at the federal level in the decade since this report, but there was a corresponding increase in state-level attempts to find policy solutions that help local media outlets stay afloat and consumers stay informed. In “An Overview of State and Local Legislation to Support Local News: Policy Mechanisms and Challenges to Impact,” Jessica Mahone, research director for the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, evaluates the current landscape for state and local media policy; however, amid the growing government intervention in supporting journalism, the impact thus far remains minimal. State and local politicians often need local media coverage more than national figures do, as they seek to inform constituents about their policy achievements and political positions, and they are picking up the slack. Journalists themselves, seeing the depths to which their industry was falling, became more open to government assistance. Sewell Chan, the editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune, the largest state-based, nonprofit newsroom in the U.S., discusses in “A Lost Decade: Policymakers Fiddled as Newsrooms Burned” the discomfort he feels in arguing that there must be some government role in saving journalism; journalists rarely weigh in, but after what Chan dubs the “lost decade” of inaction following the initial reports, journalism is in a crisis it cannot solve alone. This perspective offers a sharp contrast from the report’s “overriding premise” that the government’s role was, and should be, constrained by the First Amendment and principles of media freedom.

In the second section of this volume, we examine changes and effects of information supply within local environments. The ownership structure of local media, and the number of people employed in it, look completely different today than when the FCC Information Needs Report was published in 2011. Information is collected and disseminated by fewer and fewer journalists, who are working for a dwindling number of hedge-fund-controlled, profit-maximizing owners. In “The New News Barons: Investment Ownership Reduces Newspaper Reporting Capacity,” Erik Peterson and Johanna Dunaway find that when newspapers are owned by investment owners (hedge funds or private equity), these newsrooms have, on average, nine fewer reporters and editors compared to newspapers that remain under other owners, a cut equivalent to 14 percent of the average newspaper’s staff during this time.

How, then, is the public filling their critical news and information needs? News and information are no longer being distributed mostly to doorsteps, televisions, radios, and email inboxes: platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, serve as intermediary institutions that have swallowed up advertising revenue and users’ attention. The rationale for content creation and distribution on these platforms is not the same as those that dictated the assembly of bundles of news in the past: information is not curated by editors drawing attention to the most-needed information for local consumers but, rather, by algorithms determining the content with highest levels of psychological engagement to an audience that is categorized and defined by non-place-based identities. As Nikki Usher discusses in “Delegitimizing Rural Public Health Departments: How Decaying Local News Ecologies, Misinformation, and Radicalization Undermine Community Storytelling Networks,” as rural life outcomes worsen and economic opportunities shrink, challenges in rural America go far beyond diminished news and information. These problems, together with the nationalization of news consumption, the rise of Republican radicalization, and diminished local news ecologies, make it far harder for trusted community institutions such as local public health departments to serve their communities. As Joshua P. Darr finds in “How Sticky Is Pink Slime? Assessing the Credibility of Deceptive Local Media,” the shift in the context of consumption opens the door for local-level deception from outlets masquerading as legacy news, trying to exploit Americans’ higher levels of trust in local news for partisan gains. So-called “pink slime” news—a moniker derived from low-quality, pseudo-ground-beef filler—stands to undermine the functioning of local civic life.

This detachment from source and appeal to identity leaves consumers vulnerable to deception by outlets that may impersonate local news sources, or by other predatory institutions that fill the increasing gap left by local news institutions. As Patricia D. Posey finds in “Information Inequality: How Race and Financial Access Reflect the Information Needs of Lower-Income Individuals,” in traditionally disadvantaged and ignored areas, where minority communities have only ever experienced “local news in crisis,” the phrase “information environment” may take on a different meaning, one that should make us question our use of the phrase “news deserts.” As a whole, this section explores the various contours of information supply while updating the technological and racial context of these discussions from a decade prior.

The third section of this volume looks at the other side of information needs: demand. When people today seek out the news, technological changes have not necessarily delivered what they are looking for. Platforms and algorithmic recommendation systems have distorted the news consumption process, not just its production and dissemination, in ways that deepen inequality and political divides. As the reach of social media deepened and traditional local journalism collapsed further, demand for information changed alongside the supply in ways that are important to understand.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which stressed the news industry and the nation to a breaking point, reveals these challenges well: when the need was highest for accurate, reliable, and intensely local information about case counts and mitigation measures, the public health effects of platforms became clear. As Ava Francesca Battocchio and colleagues discuss in “Who Will Tell the Stories of Health Inequities? Platform Challenges (and Opportunities) in Local Civic Information Infrastructure,” community organizations using Facebook simply did not provide information about racial health disparities, in part because they worried about controversies that might emerge when discussing issues that could seem political. Local civic organizations have the power to reach communities with critical news and information on social media platforms, but they cannot fulfill the community information role provided by professional journalism. Information-seeking patterns have changed, too. As Stephanie Edgerly and Yu Xu find in “Local-Level Information-Seeking in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Repertoire Approach,” without a strong centralized location of local news in television, radio, and newspapers, Americans were forced to seek out information in very different ways. Their information-seeking behavior was often strongly correlated with demographics, and identity and background foregrounded the emergence of distinctive news and information-seeking repertoires during emergencies. Similarly, when local residents search online for news, Google and other platforms would not necessarily point them to the most localized information. In “News Nationalization in a Digital Age: An Examination of How Local Protests Are Covered and Curated Online,” Kokil Jaidka and colleagues show how national news dominates search results, which removes local relevance and context from journalists who know their area well.

And, of course, when we consider the dynamics of audience demand for news, a key factor is willingness to pay. On this front, specific technological changes have impacted news consumers’ willingness to pay for news. Researchers have documented how the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s led to a stampede of news organizations putting their journalism online for free, without really thinking through the longer-term implications of creating an expectation that the kind of robust, resource-intensive journalism provided by local newspapers no longer required payment (Chyi 2013). The irony here, of course, is that, a decade or so later, these same news organizations rushed to flood social media platforms with free content. This decision was arguably similarly shortsighted given how it cultivated a passive, “if the news is important, it will find me” mindset and muddied, for many news consumers, their understanding of where the journalism they were consuming actually originated (Napoli 2019).

Studying the demand for news also requires a reckoning with journalism’s history of excluding and actively harming minority communities. Joseph Torres and Collette Watson, media policy and social justice activists at the Washington, DC–based Free Press, offer a compelling account in “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm”; whether or not these communities needed information, the institutions of journalism did not serve them and earned their enduring distrust by perpetuating white racial violence and economic harm. The public discussions that preceded and were amplified by the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 also forced a reckoning within journalism, and today’s discussions of the information needs of communities should center on repairing the relationship with Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, and LGBTQ+ consumers (among many others). These groups are less often heard from in the national dialogues about saving local news, but any reparative attempts for the industry broadly should engage with the specific harms of its past.

The final section deals with adaptation: how policy and the media industry can and should change in response to these recent trends and historical legacies of supply and demand for reliable, timely, local information. Journalists, policymakers, and advocates have different prescriptions for the future of local media ecosystems, including collaborations with nonprofits, state and local government contributions, rural broadband funding and regulation promoting improved access, hiring retired journalists and students, and using local libraries and realtors to increase media literacy and find new readers. Margaret Sullivan, former media columnist for The Washington Post and former public editor of The New York Times, offers in “A Media Insider’s Wish List for Saving Journalism” the interventions she would like to see after decades spent running a newsroom and then providing insider accountability. She argues that some form of national media policy reform is needed to help shore up the kind of accountability journalism that traditional newspapers have done best.

These policy implications are complemented by areas of need: interventions in local information that could directly assist communities that are not having their local information needs met by the media. This situation has led some within the journalism community to argue that the path forward should not focus on finding ways to sustain legacy news organizations but, rather, should focus on cultivating and supporting alternative sources of “civic information” (Green, Holliday, and Rispoli 2023). Such recommendations have, not surprisingly, spawned pushback from legacy news organizations (Dudley 2023).

The pandemic exposed the populations and places in our society that are most vulnerable and, thus, left them susceptible to misinformation. Our most vulnerable citizens are often found at the intersection of historically marginalized groups, such as disabled people of color. In “The Problem with ‘Most People’: Racism and Ableism in U.S. COVID-19 Public Health Communication,” Amelia N. Gibson demonstrates how much of the COVID-19 public health information was incongruent with the experiences of some of the most vulnerable to the pandemic: historically marginalized groups and, in particular, Black people with disabilities. Often, best practices for COVID-19 mitigation and eventual diffusion of pandemic mitigation ignored those with chronic illness but with the least recourse to health care. Non-English-speaking communities have also always been served poorly by mainstream media and left vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, since the majority of media outlets in America are English-only. However, marginalized communities are resilient and find ways around their exclusion by the news media and by other institutional communicators, as Lourdes M. Cueva Chacón and Jessica Retis point out in “¿Qué pasa with American News Media? How Digital-Native Latinx News Serves Community Information Needs Using Messaging Apps.” Their study of new and innovative methods of disseminating community-level information to these communities, such as text-message newsletters, offers a path forward even as local legacy Spanish-language media continue to fail. There are other ways communities might adapt, too. Mark S. Nadel, an attorney/advisor at the FCC, offers his own personal diagnosis in “New Ideas for Improving the Economics of Producing Local Journalism” for what media policy opportunities might emerge—including rethinking the role of libraries in public life.

By focusing on policy, supply, demand, and adaptation in local news today, we hope to not only identify problems but suggest meaningful solutions to the challenge of meeting communities’ information needs. As these four sections of the volume and the scholarship detail, we know the problems, which have only deepened since the FCC Information Needs Report’s publication. Today’s media environment is saturated with news, but less of it is locally relevant and reported thoroughly by local reporters. Some communities have never been well served by their local media ecosystem but have developed means to meet their information needs in local media’s absence.

The Next 10 Years for Media Policy

The ongoing collapse of the business model of local news caused new problems and enhanced old ones, and scholars and policymakers now understand both the positives and negatives better than ever. The dialogue has shifted from a circumscribed government role to a more activist stance, where journalists themselves are calling for the government to intervene. The policy prescriptions, however, remain unclear.

While professional associations declined precipitously within the journalism community over the past 10 years, industry groups continue to advocate for policy change and are relying on new research to do so. Steven Waldman, lead author of the FCC Information Needs Report, now leads Rebuild Local News, a coalition of more than 3,000 local news providers and associated groups that advocates for government assistance for local news. Indirect subsidies, such as payroll tax credits or antitrust exemptions, are part of the history of local news in America, and Rebuild Local News is advocating to continue adapting those to today’s crisis. The change is evident: it is notable to see the lead author of the 2011 report, whose “overriding premise” was that government cannot help local news, now leading the largest industry group asking the government for assistance.

The impotence of the FCC and the inability of Congress to pass policies such as the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act leave local news without obvious fixes or a path forward. In the meantime, consolidation of news ownership in the hands of hedge funds like Alden Global Capital and Fortress Investment Group, more layoffs, and the relocation of newsrooms out of longtime headquarters continue. Now that we know more about the specific civic consequences of those changes in the local news industry, the time is ripe to reexamine the role of the FCC and media policy—and whether or not the government can support the information needs of communities in media’s time of need.

The question before us, and our hope for those reading this volume, is whether there is a chance to convert the deepened crisis into an opportunity. Government may be able to implement policies that support the local news infrastructure that exists while addressing its historical inadequacies and harm. Technological advances could make it easier to share place-based information online and thus lower the barriers to entry for people seeking civic information. The media industry could shift away from consolidation and cuts and toward independence and growth. Some might suggest a turn toward public funding (Waldman 2023), while others might encourage a radical rethinking of how community organizations might be better supported to serve as information providers or who in a community can help gather and share news (Green, Holliday, and Rispoli 2023). Moving outside the media industry might be the only way for journalists and civic information providers to actually connect with communities that have long been marginalized, not just by journalism but also by economic, educational, and cultural investment. In this way, both old technologies like radio and newer platforms like WhatsApp may be reimagined as conduits for community connection and well-being.

If these optimistic outcomes are to be realized, however, we need to think about media policy differently—in terms of the possibilities that government and industry can build together, rather than assuming that the government must get out of the way. Research over the past decade and earlier clarified that market failure for local news would likely lead to civic failures across America. With that renewed sense of urgency, we hope this volume can contribute to the conversation and shape a new wave of media policy that helps local media adapt and survive these tumultuous times for the media industry.