Post-election Glimmers and Wins: Early learning from North Carolina’s news and information ecosystem
The 2020 election is a civic achievement by many measures. It’s no less true in North Carolina. I’m pleased to report that the kind of civic outcomes detailed at the national level reflect what’s happening here. Just by the numbers from the NC State Board of Elections, the state saw record turnout in raw numbers and by the level of participation.
In this and in many other ways, North Carolina is a scale-model of what is happening right now in communities across the country. Complicated dynamics of division and disparity across race, class, gender, generation, geography, broadband connectivity, and partisan alignment that exist nationally are distilled into our 100 counties.
That’s why North Carolina is one of the most important places to invest in news and information that can help meet community needs. There is so much to do — but also so much to share about what has worked and hasn’t to address these important issues. At the NC Local News Lab Fund, we think that our learnings from spending $615,000 on 21 grantees during this tumultuous time can show us a lot about how to meet people across these divides and inform them.
While media distrust, misinformation, consolidated ownership, tenuous business models, burnout and mental strain are at play here, there are also many examples of powerful progress. New models of collaboration and an expanded definition of who can inform communities are reaching more people and helping them make decisions about their health, voting, and their futures.
There has been a statewide, full-court press that our grant partners, including our latest cohort from this summer, and many others across our news and information ecosystem mounted in response to the pandemic, ongoing racial reckoning, the Census, and the election focused on the places and people critical information wasn’t reaching.
In supporting our grant partners’ work, it’s clear that trust and knowing community needs lead to effective service.
Nothing substitutes for trust in moments of peril
We’ve seen bright glimmers of hope emerge where organizations who already have trust with communities, especially communities that might be called “hard to reach” by outsiders, when given resources and support, have been able to achieve.
Community organizations elevated information needs they were best positioned to see and delivered critical information when it mattered. Some of that work was in partnership with capital-J journalists from organizations in the wide-ranging cohort we supported this summer.
Two examples, among many, highlight those successes. Emancipate NC reported that incarcerated North Carolinians were eligible for stimulus checks, shared that information widely and made it easy to get that information and the appropriate forms to people in prison. Checks are already hitting bank accounts. Reporters at NC Health News and Enlace Latino NC built relationships with sources through grassroots networks to report on outbreaks among vulnerable workers in meatpacking plants in their own words, sticking with the story since it started in May.
Many more stories of service, impact, and learning in our state are emerging from the uncertainty of this year. We have more to hear from leaders rebuilding trust, piloting new models, and supporting collaborations at the upcoming NC Local News Summit hosted by the NC Local News Workshop on January 13.
Nothing substitutes for knowing community needs
Nothing substitutes for the keen insight into what communities need to know rather than what outside observers perceive.
That engagement requires organizations to understand their limitations, assess their level of trust, then work in equitable ways with others who have relationships that ground their reporting in what people need.
Community organizations, non-profit, for-profit, and public news organizations are running the same plays again, in more than a few cases together, as new needs emerge. The events of this fall echo across the state as oncoming redistricting, potential resistance to the coming COVID-19 vaccines, and ongoing disproportionate death and economic suffering among Black and Brown North Carolinians.
What’s Next?
We want to double down on funding news and information delivery through both news and community organizations who have critical news and information functions. Through the relationships they hold, we see opportunity for folks on the wrong side of the digital divide, the Indigneous tribes who have made their homes in North Carolina the longest, and others bearing the brunt of our overlapping crises and the quieter forms of inequality that existed before this year.
A North Carolina that determines its own future has a foothold where there’s the most work to do. Lucky for this state, there are already glimmers of hope.
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Lizzy Hazeltine is the Fund Coordinator for the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund at the North Carolina Community Foundation. She also coaches teams in the Knight-Lenfest Table Stakes program at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media and consults on revenue and audience growth topics in news and beyond.
About the fund:
The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund was established at the North Carolina Community Foundation in 2017 by a group of local and national funders who believe in the power of local journalism, local stories, and local people to strengthen our democracy. The mission of the fund is to ensure that all North Carolinians have access to the news and information they need to make their communities thrive.
The fund pursues that mission with an ecosystem strategy that combines grantmaking with programming to build resilience and sustainability in the news and information network while encouraging deep service to local communities. The model also seeks to advance the effectiveness of philanthropy in this sector by aligning grantmaking with the pooled fund and creating opportunities for funders to learn about the importance of local news and information for vibrant civic life.
