Going Underground
Over the course of human history, write Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in “The Elements of Journalism,” the spread of news and information was quite basic.
“They wanted people who could run swiftly over the next hill, accurately gather information, and engagingly retell it,” they say of how people valued the idea of “journalism” centuries ago.
In other words, the concept of people relying on their friends and neighbors to find out what’s happening around them is nothing new — it’s one of the oldest forms of communication.
So how can news organizations in 2026 take advantage of these networks that already exist in order to reach broader audiences? It’s a question Heather Chaplin and her team at the Journalism + Design Lab (J+D Lab) at The New School in New York City have asked as they seek to better understand what they’re calling “informal news networks.”
Chaplin is so bullish on informal news networks that in a 2026 Nieman Lab prediction, she argued that this is “the year journalism goes underground in America.”
“I think after the 2016 elections, a lot of journalists woke up and realized that giving people facts is not enough,” Chaplin said in an interview with Medill. “When you look at the research on how beliefs are formed, it’s almost always that people believe what the people around them believe, and they trust what somebody tells them. And so being a person over here shouting facts at a bunch of people over there, it just doesn’t work anymore.”
In the decade since the 2016 elections, information systems have only fractured further — and people’s search for trusted sources has only become more complex. Couple that with the fact that local news organizations have continued to disappear at a staggering rate and that means more time spent operating within these more informal networks to stay on top of what’s going on, so the theory goes.
That’s one of the reasons why Chaplin’s team is so focused on understanding these networks and how news organizations can benefit from them in a way that’s also beneficial to the community at large.
“I think if newsrooms invested more in how they work with communities instead of just working at the community, thinking about this as a collective approach, I think that’s really the goal here,” said Cole Goins, the J+D Lab’s managing director. “It’s about taking a networked approach as opposed to just looking at it from a content perspective. I think the other piece is, your community can do more for you than just produce content.”
In their work, they’ve highlighted a woman in Detroit who tracks vacant buildings and whether the owners are maintaining their properties; she’ll slide fliers with updates under people’s doors. They’ve encountered a barbershop in Baltimore that doubles as a space to get community updates and a former city hall worker in Fresno who helped street vendors understand how a new city ordinance would impact their businesses.
That’s not to say that these are in any way unique situations. The odds are high that people in communities across the country have access to, and are in some way involved with, these sorts of networks.
“A lot of times, we kind of cut it off because it’s not ‘capital J journalism,’” said Goins. “And it doesn’t matter. Even if they don’t call it journalism, they’re still sharing information. There’s a teacher’s strike in my community, and there’s a local news organization, and they were providing some really good reporting, but the day-to-day updates on what I was going to be doing and how I could support teachers and what to do with my child were happening in a WhatsApp group with other parents.”
The bottom line, said Stephanie Edgerly, the associate dean of research at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism whose work is unaffiliated with the J+D Lab, is that news consumption doesn’t often fit neatly into people’s daily lives. So, it’s worthwhile for newsrooms to understand the different strategies people employ and how they can meet these audiences where they are.
“The reality is that people are really busy and are looking for answers and are very aware that there’s a lot of bad information out there,” she said. “And to some extent, that hurts their efforts to actually get good information because they can be so paralyzed and so aware that there’s bad information out there that good information, it’s hard to see it stand out.”
It’s also not about a competition between trained journalists versus a parent in a WhatsApp group; it’s about understanding how the two can complement each other to produce a news and information environment that’s more responsive to people’s needs and interests.
“Having an intermediary, having this second person I think makes a lot of sense, and it shouldn’t be threatening to journalists. … We live in a very different media age, and this classic source of information has taken on new importance, different importance in this information environment,” Edgerly said. “And they can be a powerful conduit for your work, not a challenge to your work.”
A bigger tent
The J+D Lab conducts research and also partners with community colleges across the United States to help equip some of these so-called “leaders” of informal news networks to effectively act as reliable sources of information where they live.
To help community members see how they can best fit into these networks, the J+D Lab created Community News Roles, different ways that people aid informal news networks. The research includes facilitators, who initiate conversations on community issues and organize action; documenters, who might cover public meetings; and sensemakers, who help their neighbors better understand what’s happening around them.
“It’s really about building a bigger tent for folks in communities to see how they can contribute to their local news information ecosystem in some way,” Goins said. “It helps us think about concrete pathways for people to participate in their communities and to help support the flow of information in collaboration with local institutions like newsrooms, like community colleges, like community organizations.”
In Cleveland, for example, the J+D Lab is working with Cuyahoga Community College and Signal Cleveland, a nonprofit newsroom backed by the American Journalism Project and other community organizations.
Goins said Signal Cleveland and a few other community organizations help the J+D Lab train community members who take this certificate course at the college, and both parties work to connect them with opportunities to help these newsrooms expand their coverage and connect with people that the newsroom might not currently be reaching.
“I think a frame that newsrooms can shift is to think more in terms of constituents and collaborators, because to me, ‘audience’ implies a passive relationship — you’re just kind of producing stuff for people to consume,” Goins said. “As opposed to a more healthy, civic approach which is really about participation, it’s about people understanding what’s happening and getting information that they need to make sure that their community is a healthy place to be.”
Added Chaplin: “It has to be real,” she said of the relationship between newsrooms and community members. “You can’t fake it. Is it actually mutually beneficial? Are you actually going to help this network inform their community better and provide them the coverage that they need? It can’t be extractive.”
News avoiders
The J+D Lab’s work indirectly builds on research that Edgerly’s focused much of her work on, seeking to understand how audiences engage with news, and in particular, why people avoid it.
News avoidance and informal news networks go hand-in-hand, Edgerly said, because many news avoiders look to trusted sources in their personal lives — like a neighbor, a pastor or a teacher — for updates on what’s important. It’s also why audiences have increasingly turned to influencers and platforms like TikTok to get information, whether accurate or not.
This trend is particularly prevalent in communities with no formal sources of local news, according to a recent study from Medill. People report instead turning to friends and family as well as social media groups and influencers to try to stay on top of what’s happening.
“At the heart of influencers is that these people are in spaces where audiences are, and it’s not that different from the person at the barber shop or the person at the coffee shop that people want to hang out with and who holds court and leads the conversation throughout the morning,” Edgerly said. “When somebody has a following — and that doesn’t need to be millions — if we look at the local level, if they have people that want to know what they say and rely on that person to weave through what is important and will you tell me when I need to be upset or when there’s something really going wrong in our neighborhood? That takes a certain set of skills that not all of us have.”
On the local level, how can news outlets better understand who those connectors are? Research, Edgerly said.
“I think you want to be mapping the news network,” she said. “We have some ideas of the value of churches and barbershops and coffee shops and teachers. But I think one of the really important questions I always encourage newsrooms to be asking is, if you wanted this type of information or, if you had this problem in your neighborhood, where would you go? Who would you talk to? How would you get more information about that?”
It’s about learning what you don’t know, and then thinking about where the news organization can help. Where would a muscular reporting apparatus prove beneficial? What stories are we missing?
“They can be a source of how to do news that is more accessible, more reliable and that has more direct impact,” she said.
Without permission
None of this is to say that informal news networks are the only answer to the disappearance of more formal local news sources.
There are surely issues with putting trust into people with no formal journalism training to disseminate unbiased and accurate information. But, if existing newsrooms can figure out who some of the key “connectors” in a community are, there could be opportunity to work with them to help the organization expand its reach, build up goodwill and create a more collaborative environment to exchange information.
“I’ll get really challenged, because people think I’m saying that this is the answer to the future of journalism, and I’m really not,” Chaplin said. “I’m saying it’s a layer. I still am praying and fighting for large, professional newsrooms to exist. It’s not like I don’t want that. In an ideal world, you’d have multiple news organizations in every town and every community, and they would be working with this grassroots level in this mutually beneficial way.
“Since we’re in danger of losing the formal organizations, I think we need to double down on informal, but that’s not saying it’s the answer.”
In recent months, the American Press Institute has also focused attention on these networks because, as API senior vice president Samantha Ragland put it, there’s clear benefit for both sides.
“The truth of the matter is that the community at large is already participating in the acts of journalism without permission from newsrooms,” she said. “Now they’re both doing it separately. What happens when they say, ‘This is what we’re rallying around, and we’re doing it together as a real partnership and collaboration,’ versus doing it in their silos?”
Newsrooms, she added, will need to grow more comfortable with relinquishing total editorial control.
“Most newsrooms go into it still wanting the level of editorial and strategic control that would never build trust,” Ragland said. “It means that they are lording power over the informal community-oriented news networks as opposed to coming on the same level and sharing power across that network.”
Ragland, too, has seen the first-hand value of informal news networks. Her husband is in a WhatsApp group of Jamaican Americans based in South Florida who exchange recipes that their parents and grandparents used to make.
And when she previously worked at the Palm Beach Post, she saw how these informal news networks — in this case a nonprofit serving Guatemalan and Mayan Floridians — worked with the newspaper to help keep Spanish-speaking residents safe during hurricane season.
“There are far more people I think in local news communities that are aligned to the purposes and mission of local news and information than are not,” Ragland continued, “and I think that we take the easy way out by just saying they’re not there.”