Who has a role to play in our civic infrastructure?
by Lizzy Hazeltine
Public health officials, nonprofit leaders, and the whole news and information ecosystem was swirling with uncertainty and urgency by the time North Carolina’s stay-at-home order came down on March 27, 2020. It took a full 72 hours before it was translated into Spanish. It was difficult for everyone to find the information they needed and trusted about the rapidly evolving pandemic. Spanish-speakers and other non-English speakers, people in isolated rural geographies, people in poor neighborhoods, and people without internet at home were already underserved by mainstream news and info networks, and the chaos of the earliest days of the pandemic threw that divide into even sharper contrast.
El Centro Hispano, AMEXCAN and many other North Carolina nonprofit organizations saw what was happening, raised the problem to state officials and became part of the community’s solution. By activating their networks of community health workers, they improved the distribution and reach of timely, life-saving information. Closing the gap between North Carolina’s marginalized people and accessible information channels helped people navigate visa issues, schedule appointments and find transportation to vaccination sites.
Fiorella Horna, who led El Centro Hispano’s COVID-19 Project, told me that “COVID showed us where the disconnect was in regards to information.” They didn’t back away from that disconnect, but instead found an innovative way to expanded their reach, beyond the digital social channels they had established. They built a more robust website, created a corps of what became more than 40 paid community health workers, and connected with youth influencers embedded in their communities.
While the program began as a crisis response, El Centro Hispano has continued the initiative. The organization now has a corps of 36 community health workers—trusted messengers who serve as a great reminder that distribution networks don’t need to stay static, but should adapt to how communities want to be informed. That must include newsrooms and extend to many other players.
Learning from El Centro’s example
1,972 journalists lost their jobs just this year, according to Axios, and at least 360 newsrooms have closed their doors altogether according to Dr. Penny Abernathy’s 2021 update of her news desert research. These reporters and newsrooms are not expected to magically return. But this issue does present an opportunity to shift our own thinking about the local news landscape and the assets we do have.
News and information distribution is all around us, even when we don’t see it. By recognizing these invisible but vital networks, we can begin to visualize our information infrastructure in a new way, asking ourselves these questions:
What if we learned from what was already working—the El Centro Hispano example and others like it?
What if we leveraged that learning to model a new set of roles, and a new kind of civic news infrastructure that supported the community rather than blocked it from essential information?
What if we saw the core of repairing and reimagining local news as building more bridges between organizations rather than separating groups into silos based on their professional identities?
This kind of harmony among different types of organizations, I believe, is what's possible when we invite fresh thinking and a wide range of roles into news and civic information ecosystems.
The Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at UNC Hussman School of Journalism (CISLM) conducted a comprehensive census of NC’s news and information in 2022. The Census quantified and qualified what North Carolinians have understood for decades: it’s harder to find, trust, and use the news and information you need to navigate your life the further you get from our state’s major metros. Specifically, more rural counties and those with larger populations of people of color have less relevant local news delivered by fewer providers.
The same concern applies to community, health, and civic information. People need to find information that informs their daily lives, invites participation in civic processes, and shapes how we see ourselves as communities. Yet many can’t find what they need, can’t use what they find, or don’t trust what’s available.
What we know is clear. Major systems fail the same people in overlapping, harm-reinforcing symmetry.
What to do about it is becoming increasingly clear too. What we do next can start by asking what if?
What if the roles we fund are ready for a reset?
Professional journalism and the many forms of essential reporting journalists produce are the most visible roles in a news ecosystem. They provide the needed corroboration, verification and publication for fast-moving breaking news, patient long-haul coverage, keen watchdogging of the public good, and explanatory content when we grapple with uncertainty or opportunity. Journalism is one part of the whole story.
At North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, we fund organizations that report where it's needed, while simultaneously shoring up the less visible functions in the ecosystem. The unseen roles of our information ecosystem include:
the networks who distribute content once it’s reported,
a wide range of actors who ground the narratives in the experiences of people,
teams who democratize the tools of storytelling and journalism,
and organizations and individuals who challenge the ways dominant narratives and the status quo play out.
Many of our grant partners mix and match these roles, dovetailing with one another and reinforcing a decentralized approach to long-term transformation of the ecosystem.
We’ve found that professional identities and our preconceptions about innovation are far less important than efficacy based on trust, access, and belonging. The reality is that many less wealthy communities have long done much more with much less and built assets that aren’t always visible from the outside. It’s time we recognize, learn from, and invest in these networks and models.
Where our success lies: relationships among the roles
We have a wide-open opportunity to weave community-based organizations into relationships with community-centered media of all types. This is what makes up the robust civic infrastructure of any community: newsrooms, community organizations, schools, libraries, and others all have a part to play in ensuring that information is shared widely.
That relationship-building is in motion here in North Carolina, more often and more deeply every day. Over time, organizations in our state have shifted from a de facto competitive stance to a more collaborative approach. Among our grant partners, that interrelationship manifests as more shared resources, content collaborations, and expanded sourcing networks.
Durable feedback loops, healthy public debate, and broad-based narrative power bloom where grantmaking includes roles beyond news reporting. The remedy to the news industry’s market failure is not to lament a systems approach, but rather to widen the vision. Community leaders have already begun building the infrastructure, capacity, and connections to repair our ecosystems, and now is the time to fund them.
About this Series
This is one installment of an ongoing conversation about how building a more equitable local news and information ecosystem advances a future where everyone in NC can thrive. Sign up for our email newsletter to get updates like this delivered directly to your inbox.
Language Access
This post, and others in this series, was originally written in English, our director’s first language. As is our practice, the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund will continue to offer translations of our updates and public writing along with bilingual office hours, interpretation of info sessions and other events to make our thinking and our processes more accessible.