The Journalism Model Worth Celebrating: Community Media Collectives

In the past decade, traditional media has been decimated by consolidation, closures and conglomerates engulfing newsrooms. As corporations and billionaires have absorbed local news outlets, either axing the outlet altogether or neutering newsrooms, many communities have lost a vital lifeblood. This has created news deserts in many parts of the country, where local government goes unwatched and community stories are often missed. It’s been a bleak landscape, but a notable, and welcome, trend is emerging in response.

Independent and community-focused journalism has recently re-emerged out of the ashes of traditional news outlets. This wave isn’t necessarily a repudiation of legacy media but rather a way to exist and ensure that important stories get told, somehow, someway. They’re also being built with the support of the communities they serve.

There is, of course, the rise of established journalists launching their own Substack newsletters, creating a direct, reader-funded relationship that allows them to follow stories without corporate oversight.

But more structured, community-focused models are also taking root.

Coyote Media

Collectives like Bay Area-based Coyote Media, which recently launched after a successful crowdfund campaign, are organized as public-service organizations, dedicated to telling stories from within the communities that larger outlets like the San Francisco Chronicle (where some of the reporters worked) no longer serve. Coyote Media puts their mission perfectly in their “About us” section: “Inspired by the alt-weeklies of yore, we envisioned an outlet that reflected the complexity and depth of the region we know and love. We serve readers who want to feel more connected to their communities, and who understand that a city’s greatest asset is the everyday people and families living within it. That community is the only way we all survive.”

City Bureau

In Chicago, City Bureau operates as a civic journalism lab, training and paying citizens to cover public meetings, filling a gap left by dwindling local beats.

Outlier Media

Outlier Media in Detroit was founded on a service journalism model, delivering crucial information on housing and utilities directly to residents via text message.

Block Club Chicago

Block Club Chicago, a non-profit, reader-funded newsroom, was launched by former DNAinfo journalists to keep neighborhood-level reporting alive.

These independent news labs and collectives are filling major voids in communities where local media went from 5 newsrooms to none. They also offer a refreshing alternative to the current state of corporate-owned media, driven by hyper-capitalism where clickbaits, anti-think pieces meant solely to enrage the reader, AI-generated slop, and articles reinforcing the status quo dominate.

The dollars behind a masthead are who runs the newroom these days. A Substack writer’s primary boss is their subscriber list, despite some of them relying partially on advertising dollars. A community collective’s main loyalty is to its residents. This direct relationship allows them to focus on stories rather than just scaling for big brand advertisers.

While traditional media continues to navigate its challenges, these independent and community-focused outlets represent a vital, growing part of the ecosystem. They are re-establishing local beats, experimenting with new funding models, and rebuilding trust at a grassroots level. Their models often rely directly on community support, so it’s incumbent on readers to provide the financial support they need. This can make stability as elusive as an interview with Satoshi.

If we want local accountability,  we must support the independent journalists and collectives who are fighting to keep the lights on to tell the stories that communities deserve to know about. So go support your local media collective, whether it’s through your dollars or your clicks, and tell a neighbor, too.

Written by Katy L.