At the Journalism + Design Lab, we want to show the power community members have to keep their communities connected and informed.

We’ve developed Community News Roles, a framework that outlines actions that anyone can play in their community to produce, share, and act on reliable information. 

Sharing these roles is the first step in naming the ways that we all participate in local news ecosystems. By documenting the distinct and interconnected ways people can, and do, step into these roles, we can better understand them and invite, and inspire, more community members to participate in local news. 

What we’ve outlined so far is our way of honoring and reflecting what we’re seeing and learning in our partnerships and programming with civic institutions like community colleges, local newsrooms and community organizations. 

Yet it is far from comprehensive. We need feedback and examples from a wide range of people who are doing, and enabling, these roles. 

We’re inviting anyone to help shape this framework and how we develop it for others to use and apply in their own communities. It’s part of a growing movement of people who are working to build more resilient local news ecosystems with communities at the center.

There are two main ways you can help inform this framework:

1. What’s missing? How might you use this framework? 

We hope for this to be a living framework, one that’s reflective of how communities collaborate in strengthening their local news and information ecosystem. 

Please let us know any gaps you see, elements that need development or additional framing that can add nuance and complexity. 

We also want to know how you might use this framework in your life and work. By sharing the different possibilities for applying this framework, you can help us identify additional materials, resources and tools for people to use it.

 

2. Who in your community connects, inspires and informs you?

For each role we outline in the framework, we’ve included a few examples of people performing that role. These examples are meant to help illustrate the functions we’re describing, but often don’t convey the breadth of what each role can encompass. 

We invite you to tell us about members of your community who are connecting and informing you – in formal and informal ways. 

We will aim to incorporate the examples we receive into the framework and explore how t0 share them in useful ways. We will also invite people who are performing these roles to share their experiences with others in our upcoming event series and in future articles where we dive deep into each role.