How do you get your news? Tell us and help to create the future of local news. [column] | Local Voices

Ask five people in your life where they get their local news and information. Ask those at the family meal, the holiday party or church coffee hour, and you’ll likely get five different answers.

Your friend has local TV news on in the background while making dinner. Your co-worker checks Instagram when she wakes up in the morning. Your cousin follows international and local groups in WhatsApp and reads his friends’ hot takes on X (formerly Twitter) or Bluesky. Your grandma still likes to get the local paper delivered on Sunday, even though she prefers to read it on her phone. Your high school nephew gets digital education access to The New York Times and LNP | LancasterOnline but mostly scans the headlines and perhaps a newsletter on the way to school.

And go a step further: Ask those folks why local news matters to them and you’ll get five more answers. To see the weather and the traffic reports. To be inspired and feel connected. To cheer on the girls basketball team. To understand an opposite perspective on a local issue and debate it more effectively. To follow local government and elected officials (and get extra credit in social studies classes).

Dig into these conversations and you’ll find that most of the folks you’re talking with are keenly aware of the massive shifts in how we consume information with the widespread use of smartphones, artificial intelligence and social media. But they may not realize the impact those shifts have on our community.

The advertising dollars that paid for the newsrooms in the past are now flowing to technology giants such as Google and Meta, large, multinational corporations that have mined our data and perfected the art of feeding us content to capture our attention, manipulate our spending, keep us outraged, and maybe most importantly, do so at the expense of our sense of community.

The entertainment and convenience keep many of us coming back to social media, but the consequences are profound: We have fewer reliable, community-based sources for information; we consume more information from national sources and miss out on local context; we get fewer good news stories in our communities that help us see stories of collaboration between people of differing backgrounds and beliefs; and algorithms deliver more news and information we agree with and fewer perspectives that differ from our own.

These factors contribute to documented community outcomes, including increased polarization, reduced civic engagement, and less effective and less trusted public institutions.

In short: Local news and information keep communities together.

The story is the same across the country, with an average of 2.5 newspapers closing each week, according to researchers at Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University — a pace that continues to accelerate. This nation has seen the closure of one-third of print newspapers since 2005, leaving the majority of counties in the United States with just one publication, often a weekly.

The news source you’re reading right now is an outlier. It has one of the largest newsrooms in Pennsylvania and still prints a daily edition. Even with a city and metro region population roughly quintuple that of Lancaster’s city and metro area, Pittsburgh does not have a daily print paper.

Thanks to the Steinman family, who has long supported local news through the ownership of LNP | LancasterOnline prior to gifting it to WITF last year, and The Steinman Foundation’s multiyear grant to seed The Steinman Institute, we have the opportunity to better understand Lancaster County and central Pennsylvania’s local news and information needs and opportunities. We also have the opportunity to innovate to better meet those needs.

We recognize that the business model for local news is broken, but the value it provides to communities is not. To address this, The Steinman Institute has invested in innovation, fundraising capacity, and multiple new content areas launching in early 2025 to serve expanded audiences at LNP | LancasterOnline and WITF (whose parent company now is named Pennon).

In addition, The Steinman Foundation and The Steinman Institute have launched Press Forward Central PA, a local chapter of the national Press Forward movement, which is dedicated to revitalizing local news and information. This has already provided opportunities to learn from similar work across the United States, and to share lessons learned in central Pennsylvania.

One of our first steps as Press Forward Central PA is to map our region’s news and information resources. We aim to better understand who is producing local news, the business models utilized, the service reach, and gaps in the market to evaluate growth or decline. We also want to identify opportunities for collaboration, investment and support. In addition to traditional sources of news, such as newspapers, television and radio, we are assessing nontraditional sources our communities rely on, including social media content creators, email newsletters, neighborhood resources and high school and college news sources.

Perhaps most critically, we are engaging audiences directly to hear what you want from local news. At such a time of profound change in how we consume information, we need to work together to prioritize the most essential roles local news can play in our communities, and create new approaches to meet your needs.

This is where we need your help: We want to know your personal answers to the questions we asked at the top. We all have different ways of learning about what’s going on in our community, different preferences for style and medium, and different things we want to do with that information when we get it.

Check out a brief survey to get started at PressForwardCentralPA.org. We expect to complete the mapping efforts in early spring 2025, with a map and analysis published by late spring.

Together, we can create a different future for local news as a critical resource for our community, starting right here with you.

Jess King is the executive director of The Steinman Institute for Civic Engagement.