Local News & Information Ecosystems
Read the updated playbook:
Following the publication of our 2024 Local News & Information Ecosystem work, we’re excited to share an updated News & Information Ecosystem Playbook and accompanying Workbook. We hope that this playbook will allow community members — whether they are journalists, researchers, or other local news enthusiasts — to measure their local news ecosystems over time in order to identify opportunities and set goals for strengthening the ecosystem.
Accurate, fact-based, trusted information is critical to the health of any community. Individuals need information to make decisions about their daily lives. Community connection is built through flows of information that fairly and accurately reflect the lived experience of all community members. Governments rely on information providers to effectively distribute information throughout a community, even as a local news and information ecosystem simultaneously holds government power to account. And better informed and connected individuals, families, and communities, in turn, can support local news and information providers through attention, engagement, and, in some cases, monetary support. The relationship between information providers and community members is, when at its best, one based in trust and mutual respect.
In 2020, Impact Architects developed a Local News and Information Ecosystem framework, with support from Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, and Google News Initiative. The goal of this framework was to create a standardized way to assess the health of a local news ecosystem, including its strengths and opportunities, in order to compare across ecosystems and assess change over time. We prioritized using freely available, public data sources in order to ensure the framework would be accessible to anyone interested in assessing their local news and information ecosystem. We piloted the original framework in nine ecosystems, and have since updated it to incorporate indicators to measure civic engagement and democracy.
In each iteration, which you can find below, we’ve updated the framework based on the current state of knowledge about the importance of local news and information for communities (as documented in this literature review).