I come from the nonprofit world. My entire journalism career was in public media — save for a few years of newscasting at a commercial radio station in Georgia. (You could say my media journey was largely counter-reactive to my father’s long commercial media career but that’s a topic for a different post!)

So, I’m comfortable heralding the virtues of ‘mission-driven’ organizations like NPR, PBS, ProPublica, or any of hundreds of others that put service ahead of profits. And, yes, I think local, state and federal governments can actually do many things to support community journalism without compromising anyone’s editorial independence. We know how to structure rules and practices to achieve this. (See the exciting advancements in this space.)

But the majority of news delivered to the American people is reported and packaged by commercial outlets. And that’s fine, provided they can put community interests ahead of the owners’ private interests. Fortunately, the voluntary ethical standards of professional journalists assures that this happens in most cases most of the time. It’s just that even for these well-meaning outlets their advertiser-driven business model is in bad shape and subscriptions are a tough sell in today’s media-saturated marketplace.

Your tech-bros don’t seem to care about facts, fairness, or healthy communities. Zuckerberg’s announcement timed for the Trump inauguration that chased professional fact-checkers away from Facebook is par for the course. We may be awash in media messages, but we’re high and dry when it comes to verified news for the public good — especially at the hyper-local level — especially if we want social media to deliver on our basic information needs.

Alas, I’m doing some small part co-leading a team to identify ALL local news sources in New Mexico. We’ll map them, survey them and issue a report describing this home grown ecosystem. We’ll also flip the scope and ask residents directly what media they use, what media they wish they had, and what gaps exist between the media that’s there and the information needs that are going unmet. 

Here’s a recent example of such a study, released in January by the Wyoming Local News Fund. Here’s another from Montana.

If you want a big picture of what I and many other researchers are doing along these lines, state by state, here are some recent articles.

Corey Hutchins in Colorado composed this overview, mentioning us in New Mexico, and crediting universities with driving much of this activity: https://theconversation.com/universities-are-mapping-where-local-news-outlets-are-still-thriving-and-where-gaps-persist-246457

Sophie Culpepper at Nieman Labs offers a similar round-up while leading with how philanthropy is largely fueling the funding needed for this work: https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/academics-team-up-to-address-the-biggest-challenges-in-local-news-research/

And if you want to top directly into the club we’ve formed to share our methods with each other, visit the home page for our Local News Impact Consortium: https://www.localnewsimpact.org/

Our desire is for our communities — for you and you and you — to have access to a healthy diet of news and information. We’re far less worried about the big media providers (although we should all worry about those that have ditched their ethics for the sake of profits), rather we’re keenly focused on hometown USA where accountability reporting, crisis coverage, trend tracking, daily news and features are rapidly disappearing and being replaced by untruths, misinformation, and a whole lot of distracting crap.