News Fix #66: What kind of news should government money support?

I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you. If you've been reading for a while, will you forward this to somebody you'd like to bring into the conversation? I'd appreciate it.

Last week Pennsylvania House passed a bill to establish a Civic Information Consortium in the state and a separate bill to establish a local news fellowship program.

Both bills still have to be passed by the state senate and signed by the governor. Appropriations and implementation would then need to be ironed out. That's a lot left to do before state money starts flowing to support news and other civic information providers. But it's closer than ever before in Pennsylvania.

When the bill passed, I was at a small symposium where, among many other things, speakers discussed state and local legislation that could fund journalism, civic media, or both. I learned a lot and recommend this policy tracker to keep up to date. Still, the question of how to best engage with public media policy continues to be hard for me.

There are some familiar and valid concerns here about independence and public funding. All news providers, from commercial media to the individual independent journalist or creator, need transparent policies to keep money from influencing their work.

I'm more concerned about whether these emerging civic media bills can strike the right balance between pushing for an expansive menu of publicly supported local information while demanding the information be of high value and have real-world utility.

This is a real tension

Too many people who work in news still use money as a proxy for quality. If the newsroom is making money, the thinking goes, the news product doesn't need to be improved. Public media fell into this trap years ago and hasn't yet emerged. That supporters of public media love it does not mean it provides enough value to enough people across class and political divides to earn its “public” title.

There is plenty of useful work coming out of local public media stations. There is also a lot of work aimed at news junkies or providing entertainment for reliable pledge drive members. Not everything can be as valuable as Sesame Street, but Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me! isn't even close.

Civic information and civic media are both umbrella terms used in a lot of these new policy proposals. Those words can include public media and many other kinds of information besides, not all of it provided by newsrooms. There's less partisan baggage and more possibility with civic information and civic media. There's also the same risk that the phrase describes an ideal without living up to it. What is civic information, exactly, and what would make it worth public support?

Before I go on, let me clarify: I applaud these recent policy wins for news and information in states across the country and the momentum these wins create. The Media Power Collaborative (MPC) was an architect of both bills passed in Pennsylvania. I signed on to their policy agenda years ago and I still support it.

Free Press (not that one but the other one!) is a policy shop that helped pass the Pennsylvania bill, create New Jersey's Civic Information Consortium, and is responsible for similar efforts around the country. I respect and trust them, too.

I am uncomfortable engaging too directly in policy, though. I don't want to support specific pieces of legislation, particularly legislation I could benefit from directly. I'm a journalist, and that's not something we do.

I do believe in the underlying cause. I want higher-quality and more responsive local media that involves and benefits residents more directly. Public support and public money are needed to make this happen. I want to build support for this kind of work not so much among lawmakers, but among the public.

Those of us who don't lobby but know we can't just sit on the sidelines can work to create public support for high-quality civic information.

I'm thrilled, for example, that MPC's agenda has “prioritize community information needs” as one of five pillars. That idea earned its spot. Many of us helped it do that just by doing our work. There are so many examples of how journalism aimed at identifying and filling true information needs does improve real-world conditions and does garner public support.

So let's get to work now on examples of civic information and civic media that deserve to be publicly supported. Most of the current bills don't define civic media or civic information. I like the definition The Roadmap for Local News landed on, and that I've written about before:

high-quality, verifiable information that enables people to respond to collective needs by enhancing local coordination, problem-solving, systems of public accountability and connectedness.

It's a great starting point, but we need examples of what this looks like in the real world. Is it a local Signal chat or WhatsApp group that verifies information, is it some kind of remix of the Documenters' ideas, or is it a mutual aid and information hybrid? Is it a high school or college news service that manages to break through?

This is why our News Futures working group is looking for examples of civic information actors outside of newsrooms. We'll have a nomination form soon that I can't wait to share with you.

I've begun engaging in a thought experiment that might be helpful here. If I were to show somebody who has disengaged examples of what civic media could look like and what they could demand in their community, what examples would I show them to get them excited?

For this thought experiment you have to come up with more than one example, and not only of your own work. Try to think of a civic info project that uses solid reporting methods but isn't a newsroom. Please let me know what you come up with.

Until next week, take care. If you'd like to sign up for our close reading club, now is the time! Reminders will be going out soon, and our first meeting will be November 8.