Three takeaways from the 2025 Local News Researchers Workshop

While I’ve spent much of my career doing research, I’ve never identified as a researcher.

That’s because when I think of a researcher, I think of poring over books and white papers, defending dissertations and attending symposiums. But after attending my first Local News Researchers Workshop at UNC-Chapel Hill (my alma mater!) this week, I gained a deeper appreciation for just how siloed academia is from field practitioners, and how much stronger the local news field could be if we were in regular communication with one another.

These are three takeaways I had from the excellent presentations and conversations at the Workshop.

1. It will take different types of research to build a strong local news field.

One of the six support organization categories we identify in our report, “The Critical Role Support Organizations Can Play in Maturing the Local News Field,” is researchers and analysts.

While we recognize that academics publishing rigorous peer-reviewed studies and industry reporters and thought leaders publishing field analysis in industry publications like Nieman Lab are different, they fundamentally serve the same role: research that contributes to our understanding of the field.

That idea was reflected in the presentation from the Journalism Bridging Project, a collaboration between journalists and academics that focuses on the “research-practice gap in journalism” and how it can be bridged. To that end, the project’s white paper identifies a list of “players” in this space: the news industry, academia, for- and non-profit researchers, journalism support organizations and trade publications.

This effort felt similar to the point we made in our report: “A shared identity is essential to any field of practice… without it, individuals and organizations with similar motivations and goals may end up working in isolation or at cross-purposes.”

An excellent example of what happens when that research-practice gap is bridged was a presentation from The Civic Information Index, a collaboration between academics from Brown University’s Information Futures Lab and the practitioners at the Listening Post Collective. They presented a first version of the Index while soliciting feedback on how to improve the next iteration.

There’s certainly a need for research that helps newsrooms take more actionable steps to better serve their communities. And there’s a need for research that helps funders, advocates and people like us at Commoner build a stronger field. 

Case in point: At the Workshop, Steve Waldman from Rebuild Local News shared specific research questions about the nature of the local news crisis and analyzing laws to help guide policy formulation. He hopes to get these questions answered so that he can make a stronger case to policy and lawmakers about the value of publicly funding news.

What other types of research and research questions do we need to strengthen the field? And how can these different players come together to answer them?

2. People are taking seriously the challenge of broadening the field’s definition of who contributes to trusted local news.

One of my favorite presentations of the Workshop was from the Journalism + Design lab at The New School. They’ve been working with community colleges to co-develop programs that enable people to participate in their local news ecosystems.

Out of that work, they’ve developed a taxonomy on ways that anyone can inform their communities through “acts of journalism.” It’s still a work in progress and I’m eager for them to share their final draft publicly soon. I think this sort of reframing will get us closer to understanding who is (and isn’t) contributing to cultivating a trusted local news and information ecosystem and how to better support them.

There was also an entire session on “non-traditional news sources” that included Pew Research Center’s recent study on how friends, family and neighbors are a more common news source than newspapers, TV or radio stations; the role Documenters are playing to support Signal Akron; and Sarah Stonbely’s effort to build a local information and news registry, which includes civil society organizations like libraries, schools, nonprofits, faith-based organizations.

This discussion was useful as I think about one of my current projects. One of our recommendations from the support organizations report is to create a taxonomy of newsmakers, people who create local news and information, so we can continue to create a shared identity for the local news field (i.e. fill out the missing pieces of our graphic below). 

One of my goals is to contextualize, and legitimize, the work that non-journalists are doing to deliver trusted news and information to their communities. I think Liz Kelly Nelson of Project C did an excellent job of opening up that conversation with her recently published graphic of the news ecosystem that positions content creators and news influencers alongside traditional media. 

How might we create a new taxonomy for local news that moves away from the less useful “tv/radio/newspaper” labels and re-orients types of local media based on meeting community news and information needs? Then, how might we use that taxonomy to identify what types of newsmakers are best positioned to close gaps in a community’s news and information needs? 

3. People are interested and ready to develop a consensus on field standards.

Seven academic institutions steered the recent launch of the Local News Impact Consortium to collectively answer this question: How can we collect more systematic measures of changes in the health of our local news ecosystems?

Or put more simply, how do we know if what we’re doing is working?

Here’s the presentation LNIC gave at the Workshop, which includes details about their four working groups that each take different angles on how to answer this question. I’m a big fan of this effort and see a lot of promise in it because it represents the type of collective, grassroots-level effort we need to meet this moment. 

At Commoner, we’re advocating for a field-level agenda for local news, a plan that brings an expansive but representative cohort of the field together to define common goals within a collaborative rubric. Critically, this agenda should help the field more effectively organize itself in service of communities’ information needs. And we need initiatives like LNIC to help the field understand whether the field is achieving that desired impact.

We know there have been some existing efforts to create something like a field-level agenda. We also know a lot of folks in the field have been left out of those conversations. We believe there is a better way to organize this field-level strategic work, and we’re thinking through what that could look like.

Got ideas for us? Reach out. We’ll add you to our list of interested co-conspirators.

In the meantime, I’m thinking about how much I can learn from academic researchers to strengthen Commoner’s work and urge others working in newsrooms and local news support organizations to think about the research questions that could help strengthen your work.