If local journalism is so essential, why is it struggling to survive?

It is a question the industry has been asking for years, usually with familiar answers. Google and Facebook hollowed out advertising. Audiences fragmented. Print collapsed. Philanthropy is uneven. Costs rose.

All of that is true. But those explanations focus on what happened to journalism rather than what journalism must become next.

The deeper issue is that our value proposition has changed.

For most of the twentieth century, newspapers sold information. We gathered it, organized it, printed it and delivered it to people who had few other ways to get it.

That world is gone.

Today, information is abundant. Anyone can publish or livestream. A city council meeting can be streamed online, summarized by artificial intelligence and discussed across social media before a reporter files a story.

If our primary value is simply moving information from one place to another, we are competing in a market where information is nearly limitless and increasingly cheap.

But that was never the most important thing journalism produced.

What we really produce is trust.

People do not come to journalism simply because they want to know what happened. They want answers to harder questions:

Is it true? Does it affect me? What does it mean?

Those questions require judgment, context, experience and relationships. They cannot be fully answered by an algorithm, search engine or social media feed.

That is where local journalism has always mattered most. And it is where Black, Latino, Asian, immigrant and other community media have been doing essential work for generations.

CONTEXT, CREDIBILITY, EMPATHY, TRUST

When I founded The Haitian Times 27 years ago, one of our earliest decisions confused many people in the community and the industry.

We published primarily in English.

Some community leaders could not understand why a Haitian newspaper would not publish primarily in Haitian Creole or French. But we were not simply building a newspaper. We were building a bridge.

A bridge between first-generation immigrants and their American-born children. Between the Haitian community and the broader American public. Between lived experience and public understanding.

When an immigrant family is trying to understand a change in immigration policy, translating the regulation is not enough. They need someone who understands what that policy means for a household already living with uncertainty.

Whether it is a Korean business owner navigating a new regulation, a Latino parent trying to understand changes in a school system, or a Black community demanding accountability after a police shooting, the need is not simply for more information.

The need is for context, credibility, empathy and trust.

Today, through my work with URL Media, I spend time with independent publishers serving very different communities across the country. Their audiences, business models and editorial priorities differ.

But their questions are remarkably similar.

How do we build sustainable organizations without compromising our missions? How do we compete with technology platforms designed to maximize attention rather than understanding? How do we convince advertisers and philanthropy that community journalism is not charity but essential civic infrastructure?

For years, our industry has begun this conversation with revenue: What is the new business model? Where will the money come from? What can replace the advertising that disappeared?

I think we may be asking those questions in the wrong order. Before revenue comes relevance.

People do not support institutions simply because those institutions need money. They support institutions that matter to them. And relevance is created through relationships.

This is where journalism’s obsession with audience can lead us astray. We need readers, viewers, listeners and subscribers. But an audience and a community are not necessarily the same thing.

A platform can deliver a million impressions. That does not mean a million people have a relationship with you. Sometimes ten trusted people sitting around a table can have more impact than a million people scrolling past a story.

An audience consumes what we produce. An ecosystem participates in what we make possible.

Local newspapers once understood this instinctively. They belonged to chambers of commerce, sponsored community events and knew the clergy, business owners, teachers and neighborhood leaders. They were not simply covering communities. They were institutions within them.

Digital journalism gave us extraordinary new ways to reach people. But in our pursuit of scale, pageviews, followers and engagement, we sometimes lost sight of those relationships.

The answer is not to retreat to the analog era. It is to take what worked then and adapt it to the world we inhabit now.

That leads to a different way of thinking about the business model:

Journalism creates trust. Trust creates relationships. Relationships create value. Value creates revenue. Revenue supports more journalism.

That is the flywheel I believe more local and community publishers should be building.

INFORMATION AS INFRASTRUCTURE

It does not mean selling our trust. Editorial independence is nonnegotiable. But trust creates an ecosystem around a newsroom from which sustainable businesses can grow: memberships, sponsorships, events, newsletters, directories, specialized information, community conversations and products we have yet to invent.

Instead of asking only, “How do we monetize our journalism?” perhaps we should ask:

If our newsroom disappeared tomorrow, what would our community actually lose?

If the answer is simply stories, we have more work to do.

Would people lose a convener? A connector? A watchdog? A trusted source of information? An institution that understands the community and brings together people who rarely sit at the same table?

Those questions point toward another way to understand our role. We are civic infrastructure.

We tend to think of infrastructure as highways, bridges, airports and power grids. But trusted information is infrastructure too. Without it, residents may not know whether their water is contaminated, whether an election claim is false, where to go when disaster strikes or whether an online rumor could endanger someone in their neighborhood.

When journalism disappears, communities lose more than stories. They lose institutional memory and accountability. They lose a place where their experiences are documented and their concerns taken seriously. Eventually, they can lose the ability to tell their own story.

And when communities do not tell their own stories, someone else inevitably tells those stories for them.

Still, I remain optimistic because local and community journalism possesses a competitive advantage no national newsroom, social network or technology company can easily reproduce: proximity.

INDISPENSABLE WORK

Local publishers know which neighborhoods are changing, which communities have been overlooked and which stories matter before those stories become national headlines.

More importantly, they have relationships.

The future belongs to publishers who listen as much as they publish and convene as much as they report. 

Technology will continue to change. Artificial intelligence will become more sophisticated. Products and distribution systems will come and go. But the fundamental economics of trust are different. Information is abundant. Trust is scarce. Information can be scraped, summarized and aggregated. Trust cannot.

Trust must be earned one interview at a time, one correction at a time, one difficult question at a time and one relationship at a time.

Every day, somewhere in the URL Media network, a journalist attends a meeting almost no one else thinks matters. A publisher explains a complicated policy in language readers can actually use. A reporter verifies a rumor before it causes harm. Someone tells the story of a community that has gone unseen for far too long.

That work may not always be glamorous or adequately funded. But it is indispensable.

We are no longer simply in the newspaper business. We are not even primarily in the information business. We are in the trust business.

And the path toward sustainability may begin there: journalism creates trust, trust creates relationships, relationships create value, value creates revenue, and revenue makes more journalism possible.

The flywheel begins again.

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Garry Pierre-Pierre is the founder and former publisher of The Haitian Times. He’s a former reporter for The New York Times where he was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s reporting of the World Trade Center bombings in 1993.