Healthy News & Information Ecosystems
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 healthy 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.
But how do we know if a local news and information ecosystem is healthy? What are the most critical components to include in any assessment of "health"? What are the quantitative and qualitative data that can be applied across diverse news and information ecosystems? And where are aspects of an ecosystem’s health so contextual and specific as to require on-the-ground qualitative research?
With the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in late 2022 and early 2023, Impact Architects applied the Healthy News and Information Ecosystem assessment framework, originally developed in 2020, to the eight Knight Foundation resident communities. For five of these cities—Charlotte, NC; Detroit, MI; Macon-Bibb County, GA; Miami, FL; and Philadelphia, PA—this was the second application of the framework and we are able to observe change over time from 2020 through 2022. For three communities—Akron, OH; San José, CA; and St. Paul, MN—this application serves as a baselining of the ecosystem.
Findings
In many Knight communities, we heard that access to local news outlets does not mean there is necessarily local coverage and reporting. National newspaper chains have contracted and consolidated to such an extent that even when there is still a local daily paper, the staffs have been reduced and are unable to cover the community to the extent they had historically, let alone provide adequate coverage for communities previously neglected. Similarly, national television stations with local affiliates often don’t have resources to fully cover a community, or an institutional legacy of doing so.
From 2020 through 2022, the main headline in each Knight community was, unsurprisingly, the ways in which COVID-19 impacted everything from education and local government to health care and the media. COVID-19 strained journalism organizations in many of the same ways it did other institutions—to go fully remote, adapt workflows, etc.—but it also forced journalists to reconsider how they could cover or engage with communities at a time when, paradoxically, reporting was more challenging than ever but the local information was more important than ever. COVID-19 reinforced the media’s role as a key feature in any community’s ecosystem, sometimes making the difference between life and death.
The original report, supported by Democracy Fund, Google News Initiative, and Knight Foundation, was conducted in the midst of the national racial reckoning in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (which had a particularly significant impact in the adjacent Knight city of St. Paul). At that point in time, news organizations around the country were motivated to launch or revamp diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, both in reporting and in internal processes within organizations. In this 2023 assessment, we found that, in most cases, it’s too early to say whether these commitments are having lasting impacts. For example, in 2020, Gannett daily newspapers committed to having staff that reflected their communities demographically; however, publications’ leaders have said that it’s proven difficult to diversify staff while also conducting layoffs and buyouts. And with ever-lessening resources, recruitment and retention continue to be a challenge for all news organizations.
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2023 Full Report: Healthy News & Information Ecosystems
The full Healthy News & Information Ecosystems research report on eight U.S. cities.
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2020 Full Report: Healthy News & Information Ecosystems
The full Healthy News & Information Ecosystems research report and pilot case studies.
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2020 Playbook
A Playbook so you can apply the Healthy News & Information Ecosystems approach to your community.