I predict that local news sources will have a robust presence in the American heartland, and that these sources will be founded, run, and staffed by people from the heartland.
I predict that these will be journalists committed to facts and the accurate reflection of the communities they serve, and that they’ll be invested in replacing the gargantuan gap in information distribution and trust left when local newspapers closed their doors or were decimated by profit-hungry owners. I predict that the operations they run will portray the nuances of a place that has been historically misunderstood (if not ignored) by legacy media.
Okay, that may be more wishful thinking than a prediction, but I’m putting it out there. As my teenaged kid often says, “You’ve got to manifest it.” So, I’m manifesting a news ecosystem that doesn’t exclude a part of the country that helped put Donald Trump in the White House.
Nonprofit newsrooms continued to proliferate; according to the updated State of Local News report by the Medill Local News Initiative, eight in 10 state and regional news sites operate under a nonprofit model. But if even the most well-established among them aren’t immune to layoffs, how can we guarantee the survivability and success of nonprofit news anchored in economically depressed communities? How can we create a healthy news ecosystem where the voices of rural (I include every race and ethnicity in this category) and Indigenous Americans who live far from major urban centers aren’t excluded? What does it say about us if the push for more and better coverage doesn’t succeed in reflecting the true diversity of the United States?
We have a tremendous opportunity with the Press Forward initiative’s pledge to invest more than $500 million to “catalyze a local news renaissance.” I hope the people making decisions on where and how to invest the money remember that there’s a lot of America between the coasts. And I hope they remember that the best translators are those who are also culturally competent.
Fernanda Santos is a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
