How did you last learn about something happening in your community — a newspaper or a neighbor?
In today’s America, the odds are high it was a neighbor, or another source within your community that likely wasn’t a journalist. The informal ways that people share news and information with each other — through text messages, neighborhood listservs, Facebook groups, and on front porches — are a cornerstone of how people stay informed about what’s happening where they live.
We spoke with Journalism + Design Director Heather Chaplin about the origins of these informal news networks, their role in the current media landscape, and their importance in the face of threats to democracy.
Getting down the basics: what is an informal news network?
Okay, I began thinking about this idea of informal news networks in 2016 after the first Trump election. I was working on a research project funded by The Knight Foundation and the Democracy Fund taking a 20,000-ft perspective on America’s information systems. We were focused on the way a robust free press is central to how ordinary people protect themselves from manipulation and exploitation; news and information as power, and self-defense against the powerful.
To be blunt, I was growing less and less hopeful about the news business’ ability to regenerate, given the context. And I started thinking about how non-democratic cultures report on and distribute the news. Because news exists. It’s what’s happening all around us all the time. The questions are: who’s choosing what to collect, how is it being framed, and who’s acting on it?
Early research showed me immediately that there are all kinds of ways these things happen, even in societies without formal news infrastructure. No matter the limitations, people want to know what’s happening around them, and there are always people who facilitate this. Every neighborhood has someone who everybody goes to in order to find out what’s happening. There’s always someone who’s been snooping around getting the real deal on things, and maybe someone else who discusses it with everyone else, or organizes neighbors to take action. I bet someone is coming into your head right now. A couple years ago, I moved to a small rural town, and within days I had been approached by a woman who wanted to know all about my family and me, and who filled me in on everything going on with our childrens’ school and the community. I always joke with her that she should start a newspaper, and she laughs because she never considered ‘reporter’ as a job. But that’s the role she plays. Everyone goes to her to find out what’s going on.
There are shopkeepers and barbers who, maybe without even knowing they’re doing it, facilitate important neighborhood conversations. Parents have WhatsApp groups for school issues, apartment building residents have WhatsApp groups for block issues.
Here’s a good example: in my research, I learned about a woman in Detroit who tracks landlords of vacant properties in her neighborhood — she tracks if they’re paying taxes, if they’re cutting the grass. She tracked down one man who was buying up houses that had been foreclosed on, who lived in Ireland! She keeps all her work in spiral bound notebooks and if something needs the neighborhood’s attention, she writes it up, prints it out and slides it under people’s doors. This woman does not think of herself as an investigative reporter; she just wants to live in a stable neighborhood.
The point is, wherever you look, there are people doing the work of journalism, but in informal ways. So I started wondering: could we identify these people and provide them with tools and training to increase their reach and formalize their roles in their communities? At J+D, what we’re working on now is connecting these folks to their local community colleges — which is a national infrastructure I’ve also been long interested in, an often untapped resource for local news in terms of human talent, trust, community connection and infrastructure.
With community colleges as local anchors, we provide training and support, host events, and build out from there; over time we want to bring in community-minded local media and other trusted community institutions, like libraries and faith-based groups.
In other words, my question was: could we identify and nurture informal news networks where they already exist, build them where they don’t, and connect them to community-focused local institutions to increase support, reliability and impact? And, of course, plugging more traditional newsrooms into the network helps the newsroom build community engagement capacity, as well as provides opportunities for these informal practitioners. So the whole news ecosystem gets a resiliency boost.
Could a critique of informal news networks be that it’s more akin to gossip than news?
Generally people think of gossip as a bad thing — you picture a bunch of women badmouthing their so-called friend who steps away from the table. I think it’s more complicated than that. The word ‘gossip’ actually comes from ‘god sib,” which were groups of women who attended births in 17th century Europe, to help with the labor, support the family in the aftermath and to celebrate a new life. Eventually the Catholic Church outlawed the practice — the Catholic Church always got nervous about groups of women talking to each other without male supervision. Who knows what they might say to each other! So I can’t help but see ‘gossip’ as a bit more complicated. Isn’t it really just a system of underground communication used by people who those in power don’t want talking to each other?
To be clear, I’m not saying that informal news networks are the answer to a healthy free press. Believe me, I wish every community had multiple rigorous local newsrooms reporting the hell out of issues, watching local politicians like hawks and providing citizens with authentic space for deliberation and debate — for reaching compromises, which, of course, is central to a peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society. But we don’t. Many communities don’t have a single local newspaper, let alone multiple ones coming from different perspectives. So we better figure out ways to amplify and scale wherever news gathering and sharing is happening, and enable people to do it responsibly.
How do you tap into informal news networks and help them be reliable sources for news?
At the J+D lab, we’ve been working on this for about four years. It grew out of our work with community colleges. We’d been building pedagogical materials and hosting workshops with community college journalism professors for a few years when wildfires devastated Northern California in 2018. In Shasta County, two of the professors we’d worked with started a podcast with some of their students to report on what was happening amid the wildfires in real time. At the time, the county had only a ghost paper with like two reporters and a Sinclair-owned radio station. And it was a real “ah-ha” moment.
So since then, we’ve been working with community colleges to build pathways for more people to practice journalism where they live. We offer free community journalism programs at community colleges, open to anyone who wants to take them. We offer fellowships for participants with community-minded local media. We offer design workshops for community members who have ideas for products and services that could keep their communities more informed. We host events for people to share, discuss, and act on the news. And more recently, we’re looking at how to bring other trusted civic institutions — like libraries and faith-based organizations — into these local networks for news.
This work is all geared to share tools, skills, and opportunities that enable more people to keep their communities reliably informed.
Can you give us some context for informal news networks in the current age? Has the decline of the media industry – and local news in particular – facilitated their resurgence?
When you talk about the decline of the media industry, it’s important that you think about from whose perspective you’re telling the story. If you’re the owner of one of the five or six major corporations that own all the other media brands, then you’re doing all right. If you’re one of the big tech companies earning profits of twenty three, twenty five percent a year, you’re good. Or if you’re a hedge fund that came in and stripped local news outlets who had managed to survive the decimation of the ad market, then you’re psyched. And frankly, if you’re anyone who benefits from people being isolated and ignorant, distracted and self-absorbed, you are also psyched.
People often talk about how our media systems are broken, but really every system is perfect; it does exactly what it was designed to do. The question is: who benefits?
From the perspective of the other 99.9999 percent of the population, things, in many ways, stink. One-third of print newspapers have shuttered in the last two decades, and continue to close at a rate of more than two per week. There’s tons of research about how less local news means less healthy communities — all the way from physical health declining in communities without strong local news sources, to increases in regressive taxes and decreases in civic participation. And, of course, more corruption. The watchdog function of the free press just goes completely out of whack.
So yes: Americans are leaning on their communities for information because they flat out can’t get it from a local news outlet — because it doesn’t exist — but also because there is a huge trust problem with the media.
In the early 1970s, sixty-eight to seventy-two percent of Americans told Galup pollsters they trusted the press. By the late nineties, that had dropped to between fifty-one and fifty-five percent. Since 2016, only about thirty-two percent of people report strong trust in the press. And the split between people registered as Democrats and people registered as Republicans has widened vastly. Today, only twelve percent of registered Republicans trust the press. That is a wildly low number. And if you want to start considering race, only fourteen percent of Black Americans told Pew they thought it was likely Black people would be covered fairly in their lifetime.
So, you know, it’s complicated. And honest people can disagree about how much the news industry has itself to blame. There’s a quote I love from Ethan Zuckerman: “Trust in news didn’t fall. It was pushed,” which gets at the many ways faith in the press has been actively undermined and attacked by actors who benefit from people being ignorant. Donald Trump, with his nazi-echoes of “enemy of the people” is the most obvious example, but he’s only the most blatant.
On the other hand, the news industry committed many acts of self sabotage. In their book The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil mention how in the 1970s, for example, when major daily newspapers were enjoying profit margins of thirty percent and more, they cut low-income zip codes from their distribution. Since it was an ad model, they made a profit-motivated decision to focus on affluent audiences.
How can existing news outlets work with informal news networks?
First I have to say that, really, this is a vision of abundance. We’re saying, hey, yes there are all these scarcity problems with newsrooms that are struggling with capacity, but look around you! In all these communities, all these people are doing the work of reporting and discussing and sharing the news — it’s just that it’s beneath your radar. And most newsrooms aren’t set up or staffed in ways that can adequately work with these informal networks. There are incredible resources out there — community colleges, libraries, faith-based organizations, community youth centers; as well as barber shops, and parks and other community spaces. If we could connect all these organizations and people and spaces together and support the ways they share information about what’s happening locally, we’d have something overflowing with potential.
Now, okay, to be more specific, from the direct perspective of the newsroom, we have seen that getting plugged into an informal network is a direct line to the community — offering insights about needs and feelings, new sources, story ideas, and a kind of ‘last mile’ distribution for original journalism. It also challenges reporters to think about from whose perspective they’re telling their stories. Are you unconsciously siding with power, because it’s easy to call and get a quote from a press secretary at a local politician’s office? If you’re having regular interactions with people in the community, facilitated through meetings where you share your story and answer questions, or having a non-professional practitioner as a fellow or contributor in your newsroom, that’s going to be harder to do. Basically, we find it’s community engagement capacity building for newsrooms. And one of the great insights of the last decade for newsrooms has been that you’ve got to be authentically connected to your community to survive.
Are informal news networks becoming more important with the decline of traditional media?
Well, it’s the decline of traditional media combined with the rise of the attention economy-media. And a non-unrelated rise around the world of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is always hostile to open communication systems and the free flow of news, ideas, and stories. No totalitarian society has a free press or encourages its people to assemble! So to me, knowing this wave is rising, we ought to be working as fast and as hard as we can laying the groundwork for informal networks to flourish. It’s a new kind of grassroots infrastructure. If things get better, great, we’ve just created pipelines for more diverse voices to get involved with traditional newsrooms. If things don’t get better, we’re creating underground networks to keep reliable news and information flowing, which will help keep the sparks of democracy alive.