Local news must help build a civic life worth participating in

Editor’s note, Nov. 3, 2025: This piece was initially published on Dec. 5, 2023, and the below copy has been updated and fact-checked for the 2025 Civic Media Magazine, a project of The Objective, News Futures, and members of Free Press’s Media Policy Collaborative. You can read the updated letter to the editor and find more pieces from the series here.

Local news alone will not solve the challenges in American democracy. Neither will the bridging movement meant to unite people across political divides, nor the civic tech platforms making government data more accessible. Each of these fields promises to build a healthier civic life in our communities. But over the past years, it’s become clear that these fields’ scope and impact are limited when they get too narrowly stuck in traditional models, putting artificial boundaries around what they are.

When CivicLex first started, we looked a lot like a newsroom with an extra twist of community engagement. We were a website that covered city hall meetings, hosted workshops that brought residents to connect in person and learn about civic issues, and pushed people to show up to important local government meetings. 

All great things, but over the past seven years, we’ve learned that those things alone can actually undermine faith and trust in civic life, leaving people more disempowered than they started.

At CivicLex, we want practitioners, field builders, and funders to see why it is important for local news to align with other movements in the civic health field. Because of our integrated approach, we spend a lot of time interacting with the various fields that compose this ecosystem — and in each field, we see organizations placing constraints around what their work is and isn’t, hesitant to color outside of the lines. In local media, specifically, this dynamic seems to be manifesting around “journalism” vs. “civic media/information.” 

But in many ways, local news is the most well-positioned of any field in the healthy democracy ecosystem to broaden its scope and deepen its impact on civic health. 

Local news, as a concept, actually makes sense to people. The field is growing with new, place-based startups led by and with their communities, and funders are beginning to understand its importance. Emerging business models in the local news ecosystem are significantly more stable than most other organizations in the healthy democracy ecosystem.

We have a unique vantage point on that ecosystem at CivicLex. Part of that comes from being in Kentucky, a different geographic and political context than many national organizations and funders doing this work. But most of that is our structure, which integrates various parts of this ecosystem into one organization: We publish reporting and local news, bring people together across differences, daylight civic data (making it easier to understand and utilize), help design and activate public space, run civic education programs in our school system, use art and culture to address civic challenges, and design new ways for the public to participate in civic life. 

A typical news organization might see its role stopping at reporting the facts. It may even see partnering with their local government on projects of this scale as a conflict of interest. We see incorporating these different strands of civic health work as essential to our mission and imperative to our impact. 

I remember a conversation with a resident who, after attending a handful of our workshops and reading our newsletter, decided to show up at city hall to comment on a small piece of legislation going through a council meeting that night. But she left the meeting upset with the council and with us, frustrated that we encouraged participation. Why? Because the night they showed up to city council, the council took public comment after they voted. She told me she would never do that again because it was a waste of time. The work of helping her understand local government, engage with an issue, and participate was undone by a single frustrating meeting.

Two years later, we launched a collaborative project with our local government to reimagine how the public engages with our city council. We gathered input from over 1,000 residents, interviewed city staff, and created recommendations for improving public meetings.

As a result of that work, Lexington’s City Council adopted several changes to make it easier for the public to engage, including the creation of a new public information officer, moving public comment to the beginning of meetings and implementing new software that allows for virtual public input and legislative tracking. To date, the council has hosted preview events as a way of gathering input on legislation before it enters committee.

And this isn’t our first (or last) project built in collaboration with our local government. We embedded three artists in local government to create new ways of engaging residents and telling the story of government workers. In 2022, we hosted 509 conversations in one week on land use planning, providing public input for Lexington’s 20-year Comprehensive Plan update. We are working with our city’s Divisions of Planning and Parks and Recreation to develop new ways of making greenspace policy that centers marginalized communities. We’re helping our school system reimagine its state-mandated civics curriculum to focus on local government and civic participation.

If local news is going to lead the way on civic health, it can’t just look like reporting as per the newsrooms of yesterday. If we want people to value local news, we must demonstrate its importance to young people early in life. If we want people to trust our data and sources, we must help them navigate that data themselves. If we want people to be open to different perspectives in our publications, we must build spaces where they actually interact with people who are different from them. If we want the information and reporting we produce to compel people to participate in the decision-making that shapes their communities, we must build a civic life worth participating in.

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Richard lives in Lexington-Fayette County, Kentucky, and works on civic health at the local level. He is the Founder and Executive Director of CivicLex, a civic health and media organization recognized as a solution for rebuilding American Democracy for the 21st Century by the Library of Congress and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Bettina Chang. Fact-checked by Bashirah Mack.