Cultural fluency is the strongest currency for media in 2026

Legacy institutions have spent decades treating cultural fluency as optional. In 2026, it will define survival.

This year, as legacy news outlets slashed diversity teams, eliminated community beats, and gutted cultural coverage, they undermined the very asset that determines relevance in today’s fragmented media environment: cultural fluency.

These cuts were framed as cost-saving measures, but in reality, they stripped away the expertise that allows media institutions to build trust, resonance, and meaningful connection with the audiences they claim to serve.

What many executives dismissed as “soft coverage” was, in fact, the connective tissue between journalism and community — coverage rooted in identity, lived experience, and a deep understanding of the social worlds their audiences inhabit. And the business case for this miscalculation is stark: racial and ethnic minorities now comprise 42.4% of the U.S. population, making cultural fluency not just a moral imperative but a market one.

In 2026, cultural fluency will emerge as the strongest currency in news and journalism. It will determine which institutions collapse under their own irrelevance and which rise to meet the public’s shifting expectations for truth, connection, and context.

The forces shaping media today — fractured attention, algorithmic feeds, declining institutional trust, and the rise of niche creators — have made one truth undeniable: audiences no longer offer their attention to outlets that do not understand them. They want journalism that reflects lived realities, honors nuance, and speaks in a voice that resonates with their experience. They want reporting that contextualizes rather than sensationalizes, respects rather than flattens, and serves rather than exploits.

This is where cultural fluency becomes essential. It is the ability to translate culture rather than extract from it, to tell stories with communities rather than merely about them, and to understand the historical, social, and emotional landscapes people carry into every headline they read.

Cultural fluency requires embeddedness over extraction, historical grounding, relational accountability, and community-defined standards. These capabilities cannot be automated. In an environment where AI has commoditized content production, the human capacities that resist automation become the only sustainable competitive advantages left. Legacy institutions divested from cultural fluency precisely when it became most valuable — trading long-term relevance for short-term savings as the U.S. population grows more diverse, connected, and digitally expressive.

Community-rooted media have always understood that news is not just information; it is identity, memory, and meaning. From niche newsletters to high-impact podcasts, Black storytellers in particular have long embraced relational journalism over institutional journalism. They recognize that Black audiences are early adopters of new technologies and formats, that culture drives markets, and that attention gravitates toward storytellers who see, honor, and respect their audiences.

These outlets are prototypes for the future of journalism. They are building content ecosystems rooted in cultural insight, historical grounding, lived experience, and deep community trust. And audiences are responding because people will always choose the storytellers who choose them back.

Trust is earned in community, not manufactured at scale. And that trust becomes a business advantage: community-supported models consistently outperform ad-dependent ones in both retention and lifetime value.

In 2026, the line between journalist, creator, educator, and community leader will blur even further. Culture-based creators — including journalists, historians, educators, comedians, and commentators — are already outperforming legacy outlets in engagement, loyalty, and relevance. They are launching podcasts, docuseries, educational tools, newsletters, and live events with an agility legacy institutions cannot match. And they are winning because they listen, respond, and serve.

At its core, the purpose of journalism has never changed: to inform, empower, and equip the public. But the public is no longer waiting for legacy outlets to evolve. They are actively choosing the storytellers and platforms that reflect a deeper, shared understanding of their lives and experiences.

In 2026, cultural fluency will be the gateway to trust, influence, and longevity. Culturally fluent media organizations and creators will lead this new era because they have never forgotten what legacy media too often neglects:

The stories we tell are designed to serve the people. And the people will decide who gets to tell them.