Glossary of Terms
Civic action
Individuals and/or communities taking steps to shape decisions affecting their lives, including gathering and sharing information, organizing their neighbors, and participating in public meetings or processes.
Civic power
The capacity of individuals and communities to shape the decisions that impact their common life.
Civic information
Information that equips people with what they need to shape the places they live. This includes actionable knowledge about public services, local government decisions, community resources, and issues affecting neighborhood well-being.
Civic media
The practices, platforms, and institutions through which communities produce, share, and act on information in service of civic life. Civic media encompasses professional journalism and extends beyond it to include libraries, community organizations, digital platforms, and informal networks such as group chats and block clubs that facilitate the sharing of actionable information.
Generative civic relationships
Relationships that bring unforeseen, novel solutions to complex issues or problems. These relationships form bonds between individuals and their environment that lead to fuller participation in civic life.
Communication infrastructure
The interconnected system of people, organizations, communication channels, and resources through which information flows in a community.
Equitable information system
A set of networked actors and institutions, standards, and practices that collectively enable all members of a community to access the information they need to meet their basic needs and act politically to shape the conditions of their lives.
Just democracy
Conditions of society and government that deliver 1) strong basic quality of life outcomes (such as health, housing, economic security) and 2) the ability for people to actively shape and define the conditions of their lives in relationship with others.
Journalism skills
The core competencies used to gather, verify, contextualize, and share information in the public interest. These include research and evidence-gathering, interviewing, fact-checking, clear communication, critical thinking, data literacy, ethical reasoning, and civic and cultural literacy. While traditionally associated with professional journalism, these skills can be better understood as practical civic competencies that anyone can develop and apply, whether or not they work in a newsroom. At City Bureau, building journalism skills is part of how we equip people for more informed, active participation in civic life.
Multilocal
An organizational model for civic information production in which shared operational infrastructure—business functions, editorial and ethical standards, technology, fundraising—supports locally rooted people-powered journalism practices across multiple communities. Multilocal models can increase civic information capacity while preserving local context, relationships, and trust.
People-powered journalism practices
Approaches that bring the public into the processes of identifying, producing, accessing, and amplifying civic information—not merely as audiences or sources, but as active participants in editorial decision-making, information gathering, content development, and content distribution. The public powers these practices, and these practices give power to the public.
Public interest
The shared stake that all members of a civic community have in the conditions of their common life. Public interests are interests we share in our capacity as members of a community.
What’s Informing Our Approach
City Bureau’s strategic direction is informed by a decade of practice and rigorous engagement with scholarship on information equity, communication theory, and organizational change. The work mentioned here shaped our understanding of the problem as well as the design of our interventions.
Our work has been informed by the literature on the market failure around public interest news and information, including the work of James Hamilton (All the News That’s Fit to Sell), Victor Pickard (Democracy Without Journalism), Nik Usher (News for the Rich, White, and Blue) and the FCC reports on the information needs of democracy from the late 2000’s. The core insight is that information inequality is not an oversight or accidental glitch, but a predictable outcome of treating journalism purely as a commodity.
Many of our strategic priorities are heavily influenced by Communication Infrastructure Theory, developed by Sandra Ball-Rokeach in the context of ethnic media in Los Angeles in the early 2000’s. The concept of micro, meso, and macro storytelling networks gave us an incredibly helpful analytic for thinking about our work, and the core insight of CIT—that the meso level storytelling network in a community is what enables residents to collectively identify problems and take action—is at the center of our work. The possibilities for quantifying the strength of that meso-layer communication infrastructure, as CIT did through Storytelling Network Integration Index, will be central to our own research during this strategic plan.
Andrea Wenzel’s work on creating equitable news organizations and in Community-Centered Journalism has helped us connect Communication Infrastructure Theory to contemporary challenges in local journalism practice.
Our approach to the strategic planning process itself was anchored in the Two Loops Model developed by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze in The Life-cycle of Emergence: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.
Our thinking about the new roles in journalism production has been influenced by Anika Anand and City Bureau co-founder Darryl Holliday’s reflections in “This is Local News Now: Rethinking who Creates, Shares, and Sustains It” as well as the work of Journalism + Design on Community News Roles.