The year journalism goes underground in America

Forty years of toxic media policy, the libertarian ethos of big tech, the collapse of the 20th-century business model, the paranoia and extremism of online life, the rise of the far right: when stirred together, these nutrients do not constitute the soil for a healthy free press.

This is certainly not the first time people have found themselves with a dearth of formal news structures. Besides most of human history, one could point to present-day Hungary or Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Or to any Black or low-income neighborhood in America to which the formal news infrastructure of the 20^th century did not always extend.

In these pages, I have written previously about informal news networks — the ways people everywhere, all through history, have developed ways of collecting and sharing reliable news and information in their communities, with or without the support of formal news organizations. There’s nothing new about this. What is new is that increasing numbers of Americans are relying on these systems — whether to get realtime information about a wildfire or a teachers strike, to ensure that community history is not lost, or to discuss with neighbors what to do about a rumored ICE raid. We’re slipping beneath the radar in our news habits, sometimes because there is no local news organization to provide the information we need — and sometimes because it’s not safe to do otherwise.

Envisioning this shift as opportunity rather than a disaster means accepting a more expansive view of what journalism is and who does it. I have long argued that resilient news systems require more than just what takes place inside a formal newsroom. A top-down approach is not intrinsically bad, but neither is it sufficient. For much of the 20th century, newsrooms were considered the sole fountainheads of journalism. And this left journalism brittle, as its destruction over the last twenty-plus years attests. Considering the stark business reality of the news business, and the even starker realities of the political climate, I can’t help but think that the future will increasingly be made up of highly diverse systems of news production and distribution that live close to the ground — that intersect with formal news organizations when possible, but that are capable of flying beneath the radar altogether.

In the spirit of illuminating what this might look like, I offer a few insights from a recent study conducted by my colleagues at the Journalism + Design Lab at The New School, Megan Lucero and Cole Goins: Community News Roles: A Framework for How People Keep Their Communities Informed.

This study grew out of our work building grassroots news networks in partnership with community colleges. We had begun to notice patterns — roles that ordinary people in their neighborhoods were consistently taking on, in order to keep news flowing. After several years of study, Cole and Megan identified eight primary roles that people play: facilitating, documenting, commenting, inquiring, sensemaking, amplifying, navigating, and enabling.

For example, there’s the facilitator in Cleveland who hosts “neighbor nights” to foster conversation about local issues; or in Camden, New Jersey, the two professors who formed an oral history project to document and preserve stories of Black activism in their city. In Philadelphia, we met a formerly homeless woman who commented in a local newsletter about what a new court decision would mean for the rights of unhoused people. In Asheville, North Carolina, we met a woman who inquired about water safety after floods in 2024, crowdsourced the issue, then created a shareable resource guide.

In Fresno, we worked with a woman who met with Spanish-language street vendors to help them make sense of a proposed ordinance that would affect them. In Altadena, California, a meteorologist amplified news about the recent fires on his Facebook page. In Portland, “Peer resource navigators” at Portland Community College meet with students to help them navigate basic resources, like food and housing. An artist we work with in Oakland enables community members to be involved in news production by hosting workshops and curating public installations of the arts projects they make concerning local issues.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that this kind of work alone makes for a healthy free press. In an ideal world, this would be simply the grassroots layer of a multidimensional system, wherein trained professionals did their bit and community members did theirs. Particularly when it comes to expensive and time-consuming investigative work, this model may never be able to produce what a team of trained New York Times professionals can.

But it’s critical not to get caught in binary, either-or thinking. When resources are scarce and opposition fierce, what can we do but drop old prejudices and join arms? We have found that newsrooms that partner in real ways with these grassroots community networks get vital “last mile” delivery, and a vastly expanded capacity for community engagement. For example, The Journalism + Design Lab created a fellowship program in which community members worked with local newsroom Signal Cleveland as “community listeners” — and then also, at Cuyahoga Community College access centers, reported back to the community on election news.

In other words: I’m aware it’s not a dream scenario for journalism to take up residence underground. But I think it’s a realistic one, considering current conditions. We would be wise to invest in the people already doing the work of informing their communities, and those who want to. And as vilification and violence against news organizations are only likely to increase, we’d be wise to make sure existing newsrooms get plugged into these grassroots systems as quickly, and as effectively, as possible.