Predictions — said someone — are a fool’s game. But there’s little doubt that in the next year we will continue to bear painful witness to the decline of America’s formal news structures. Twentieth-century news outlets will keep crashing by the wayside — victims to changing business and technological models, to hubris, to cultural mistrust and to overall irrelevance in people’s daily lives.
But it’s also true that news and information won’t stop circulating and that people won’t stop talking to their neighbors about thorny topics.
People without free presses, or laws to protect journalists, have always found ways to collect and share news, to debate and compromise on the issues of the day. In a non-democratic country like Cuba, people have long passed flash drives hand to hand, containing stories unlikely to make it past the scrutiny of censors. In his book The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Robert Darnton outlines all the ways French publishers in the 17th century managed to get their work out despite royal threats. Go into any neighborhood today in America, especially ones that have never been served by mainstream news organizations, and you’ll find people fulfilling the roles required by a free press — listener, reporter, synthesizer, convener, publisher, sense maker, and so on. You’ll find people who are trusted by their neighbors, acting as news collectors and sharers, as facilitators of difficult conversations and painful compromise.
I have long been interested in the idea of informal news networks, and what role these often unseen systems of communication might play in the future, as America slides further away from its democratic aspirations. In research I’ve conducted on the topic, I’ve learned about a barber in Baltimore who hosts casual discussion groups while cutting hair; a UPS driver in Central California who delivers sensitive information along with his packages; a woman in Detroit who documents neighborhood evictions in a self-published newsletter; the community college professors in Shasta, California who started a podcast during the Carr wildfires; and an elderly woman in Orange County who reads the news on a YouTube channel in her native Vietnamese dialect. I recently moved to a small rural town, and within two weeks I had identified our local “reporter”: a woman who knew everything and everyone, who could answer any question about local politics, local events, or local history, and had an uncanny ability to make everyone with whom she interacted trust her.
I do not feel foolish, therefore, to predict that informal news networks like these are going to play increasingly important roles in the near future. The question for professional journalists and other champions of the news business is this: Will we look down on these networks, ignore them, or join them?
It’s to all of our benefit to chose the latter path. Working together — professional newsrooms with individual community members, with local civic institutions, with parents groups, with faith-based organizations, with arts groups, and so on — we can strengthen and build local news systems that are resilient rather than brittle. News “products” can be face-to-face conversation, text chains, WhatsApp groups, wheat-pasted fliers, art exhibits, local discussions about international pieces of investigative journalism, Facebook groups, and YouTube channels — as well as written articles, podcasts, and video.
At Journalism + Design, we’ve chosen to partner with community colleges in this work. We co-design approaches to identifying and nurturing informal news networks, sometimes providing certificate programs in community journalism, sometimes partnering with local media outlets — such as Signal Cleveland, El Tímpano, and Fresnoland — and sometimes hosting photography exhibits at our physical space in Oakland, California. But that’s just how we’ve chosen to work. Once the goal is no longer to recreate news organizations as they existed in the past, but rather to ensure that reliable news and information flows — that there is a place in people’s lives for deliberation and debate — then possibility blossoms.
The recent presidential election has sent shockwaves through communities of people who care about a free press. It’s worth remembering for all the distraction of the president-elect himself, that this victory is the culmination of a hundred years of activism. Books like Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade by NYU professor Kim Phillips-Fien, Dark Money by The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, and Democracy in Chains by historian Nancy MacLean tell the origin stories of today’s far-right libertarian movement — stretching back to the mid-1930s, when men like Irénée DuPont, president of the DuPont company, organized tirelessly against the New Deal, to the billions poured into libertarian causes by Charles Koch starting in the 1960s. All of those people were planting seeds that have been slowly coming to fruition decades and decades later.
Today, as we face what can feel like unsurmountable challenges, when we see a society failing in many of the ways most vital that it succeed, it can be easy to be demoralized. But this is just the moment when we need to be most diligent planting the seeds for the future we want — even if we won’t be there to see them bear fruit.
I predict that there are enough of us willing to step forward into the uncertainty and nurture the seeds of what could be.
Heather Chaplin is director of Journalism + Design at The New School.
