In 2023, a group of us published “The Roadmap for Local News.” Channeling the 51 leaders, journalists, and innovators we interviewed who are shaping the future of local news, we offered a vision and set of recommendations for our emerging field.
The practice of “civic media,” we argued, offered not just a replacement for the collapsed for-profit local news that had come before, but a new approach that could foster a civic revival in local communities that was more equitable, democratic, and dynamic than what had come before.
We celebrated the fact that civic media’s practitioners – startup (and some legacy) newsrooms, but also community groups, think tanks, libraries, and schools – were building something new: diverse and collaborative media ecosystems rooted in a shared commitment to serving local information needs, not just the needs and interests of subscribers and advertisers.
And our first recommendation was not just to orient our work around the goal of expanding civic information (rather than saving the news business), but to “shift our measurement, philanthropic investments, and public policy focus accordingly.”
For example, an annual census of the health of the local news business tracking newsroom employment and advertising revenue is less helpful than asking, on an annual basis, the extent to which communities’ information needs are met in each community, state, and region, across key demographic groups, within key government bodies, and regarding the top issue areas that affect communities.
That, in short, is what the Civic Information Needs Census (CINC) hopes to provide to as many communities as possible across the country.
CINC is inspired and informed by other work in the field, including both national measurements (like the Civic Information Index and Pew’s surveys on local news) and the local efforts (like Lenfest’s information study of Philadelphia and assessments built by civic media innovators like Documented and Outlier, CINC). And it is rooted in definitions of civic information health advanced in the 2012 Friedland Report to the FCC and HHS’s Social Determinants of Health.
Because we believe every community deserves access to the civic information it needs to thrive, we believe every community deserves a quantitative measurement of those needs. And we believe those measurements should be consistent between communities so that we can compare and learn, persistent over time so that we can track progress, and actionable so that the data serves the civic media practitioners doing the work.
Every CINC survey has a set of questions that remain consistent: we ask respondents to rate 1. the importance of information about 10 local topics (like Education, Economic Opportunity, and the Environment), and 2. their satisfaction with the information they have on those issues. In highlighting the gaps between importance and satisfaction (for the community overall and sub-groups), we identify community needs.
For example: while 90% of Americans in a 2024 CINC survey viewed information about local weather as very or somewhat important, 90% also said they are very or somewhat satisfied with the information they have. In contrast, while a similarly high 94% said information about “local risks and emergencies” is important to them, just 72% were satisfied with the information they have.
Understanding these gaps – how big they are, whether they are growing or shrinking, and which communities feel them the most – is an essential tool in prioritizing civic media and ensuring we’re making measurable progress toward a world where every person has the local information they need to thrive.
To see all of our research, visit the CINC website.