America’s media system — the infrastructure through which communities learn what their local institutions are doing, what public officials have promised, and what is actually happening in their neighborhoods — has been deteriorating for two decades. The collapse of local journalism, the concentration of platform power, and the hollowing out of public media have created accountability gaps that affect every other civic issue.
This hub is in the early Sentiment stage. The work right now is documenting what is actually happening in specific communities — not debating national policy proposals — and developing a shared picture of the problem grounded in direct experience.
Start Here
Media Reform: An Introduction — What “media reform” means, how the current system is failing, and why this connects to civic organizing more broadly.
Media Reform: Issue Overview — A detailed look at the scale of local news collapse, the structural causes, the civic consequences, and the current policy landscape.
Understanding the Issue
The Local News Collapse: What It Looks Like on the Ground — The documented scale of closure, the communities most affected, and what the loss of a local paper actually does to civic life.
Who Owns the News: Media Consolidation and What It Means for Communities — How consolidation by hedge funds, private equity, and broadcasting conglomerates has accelerated the decline.
The Civic Accountability Gap: What Disappears When Local Journalism Does — What local journalism historically produced and what the evidence shows happens when it disappears.
Platform Power and the Advertising Collapse: How Google and Meta Hollowed Out Local News — The structural shift that destroyed the advertising revenue model local papers depended on.
What Media Reform Could Look Like: A Survey of Current Proposals — The range of approaches being actively debated — public funding, antitrust, local ownership rules, platform accountability, and nonprofit models.
What Fills the Gap: Nonprofit News, Digital Startups, and the Patchwork That Followed — What has emerged to replace commercial local news, which communities it reaches, and where the gaps remain.
Rural Communities and the News Desert: A Specific Geography — Which regions have been hardest hit, what coverage disappears first, and what’s distinctive about rural news loss.
Pink Slime and Astroturf Outlets: When Something Looks Like Local News but Isn’t — Websites designed to mimic local news that publish partisan content or PR filler — what they are, who funds them, and what they displace.
Rights and Consequences
What Local News Loss Costs People: A Rights-First Look — The civic rights dimension of the local news collapse — what it costs communities in accountability, participation, and self-governance.
Institutional Interests
Who Benefits from the Current Media System: Institutional Actors in the Local News Collapse — The hedge funds, broadcast conglomerates, and platform companies whose documented positions and actions have shaped the current media landscape.
History and Context
How American Journalism Got Here: A Short History of the Business Model — From the penny press to chain ownership to digital collapse — why the advertising-dependent model was structurally vulnerable.
Public Media in the United States: What It Is and How It Works — The CPB, NPR, and PBS structure, how public media is funded, and what budget constraints have meant for local coverage.
How Other Countries Fund Local Journalism: A Comparative Look — License fees, per-article subsidies, and direct public funding in other democracies — what each model produces.
How the System Works
The Journalist’s View: What the Local News Collapse Has Done to the Workforce — Job losses, working conditions at surviving outlets, and how thinning newsrooms change what gets covered.
What Happens to Information When the Local Paper Closes: A Survey of the Research — Academic research on voter turnout, corruption, municipal costs, and civic participation following newspaper closure.
Join the Conversation
The forum space for this issue is open. If you have direct experience with local news loss in your community — school board coverage that disappeared, a government contract that went unnoticed, a neighborhood story that nobody covered — that experience is what this hub is designed to surface.
Join the forum discussion — or read How to Contribute for an overview of how the forum works and what kinds of contributions are most useful at the Sentiment stage.