“Every Public Meeting on the Record”: The Documenters Model of Local Journalism

• In Event: Changes in Local News and Their Political Impacts

Abstract

Can we maintain and improve upon the civic benefits of local news during its ongoing crisis, given its dramatically decreased revenues and increasing competition for consumers’ attention? Efforts to save local journalism often cling to models of news delivery from its heyday: for-profit newsrooms with broad readership that can support dedicated civic reporting. As legacy newsrooms lose employees and circulation, however, they are increasingly unable to provide valuable surveillance coverage of city government that can reduce corruption and increase accountability and efficiency (Hamilton 2016). At the same time, legacy media outlets have been forced into a subscriber-based model that encourages them to chase white, liberal, wealthy customers (Usher 2021), exaggerating historical inequalities in local journalism and failing to address low trust in journalism in cities’ most disadvantaged neighborhoods. A new model hopes to reverse these dynamics based in a program called Documenters, with a simple premise: recruit a representative group of regular people to attend and take notes on city government meetings; pay them $18/hour to do so, including time for preparation and editing; and establish a newsroom to report on city government using their notes, insights, and – most importantly – questions. The questions of regular people who are being incentivized to pay close attention to city government present the opportunity for a genuinely new basis for news, producing how-to guides, explainers, and stories that are aimed directly at the communities that need the most help from city government policies but trust journalists the least to help them.

In this study, I use a mixed-methods approach to explore how Documenters-based newsrooms could change local news and improve city government. Qualitative interviews reveal that this Documenters model, taking shape in several new startups in the Midwest (Signal Cleveland, Signal Akron, City Bureau (Chicago), Outlier Media (Detroit), and Mirror Indy (Indianapolis), among others), is perceived as qualitatively different from legacy media outlets by local politicians. To assess public attitudes, I will field representative pre/post survey experiments in several Documenters cities in March and April of 2024, randomly exposing some respondents to descriptions and examples of Documenters coverage with incentives for newsletter signups. These survey experiments will be combined with content analysis of articles and Documenters notes, travel to each of the sites named above to observe and conduct interviews in March 2024, surveys of the Documenters themselves in April 2024, and pre-post focus groups to provide more richly detailed responses. Documenters-based newsrooms rely almost entirely upon philanthropy but have the potential to maintain civic benefits of local news at far lower costs. This comprehensive mixed-methods study aims to articulate those benefits and assess the efficacy and sustainability of this effort to retain the civic accountability that only local news can provide in the face of its unprecedented challenges.

Author

• Joshua P. Darr, Syracuse University