Every so often a question relevant to this melange of ideas about news demand and civic engagement comes to mind. This often happens at entirely inopportune moments to act on those questions, i.e. go web searching, or send a message to someone, or just sit and think and write. It happens when I’m reading a book or article, or watching a documentary, or in a meeting on whatever unrelated topic and someone says something unintentionally pithy or profound.
Over the past two years and change, this stash of questions has grown into a cache of research jumping-off points, prompts for conversation, and provocations for my colleagues. It’s common for me to re-read older questions when I return to add a new one, and in doing so refine or embellish the previous ones.
It’s also been my well of ideas for things to write about here, and as I looked at this list asking myself what topic to expound on next, it occurred to me, “Why not just put the whole list out there as … well, a list?”
So that’s what this is.
The questions
What makes information matter?
Journalists will often say, “This is an important story.” Is that how non-journalists think? How much of the crisis of local news is the gap in the evaluation of whether and which information matters?
Why do people pay attention?
What do I get for my attention? What’s in it for me? Does this have any relationship to whether the subject of my attention “matters”?
What makes people care about public life?
Conversely, why is that so many people seem to not care about local civics?
What makes someone need the news?
We’re not wired to need the news like hunger or thirst. Being informed doesn’t show up in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And yet there are people who get angry or sad at just the thought of losing their hometown daily paper. Where does this loss aversion come from? What conditions contribute to people developing this felt need?
What if journalism’s crisis starts before journalism?
Do education, social capital, institutions, political efficacy, community attachment, economic security, and all the upstream conditions matter more for news demand than anything people inside journalism could do about news demand by just doing what we already do (i.e. run news-producing and -distributing operations).
What creates demand for journalism?
Like, is it even possible to empirically divine or demonstrate that certain conditions or structures or behaviors lead to wider and durable demand for news?
Where does demand for news come from?
An economist hears “demand” in their academic context; a sociologist asks about social influences; a psychologist thinks motivation, behaviorism, and reinforcement; an educator thinks literacy; a political scientist thinks efficacy.
When does knowing something become useful?
If we’re not producing enough “news you can use,” well, how do we know what types of journalism are useful? What makes it usable?
What makes knowing lead to doing?
Merely inciting an emotional response is not enough. What co-occurring conditions or stimulus make it more likely that interaction with an information product or service translates to behavior (especially novel or a lapsed behavior)?
When does information become agency?
We like to say “knowledge is power,” but what’s necessary and what’s sufficient for that to be true?
Why pay attention if nothing will change?
Isn’t this the basis or rationale for news avoidance? What about the current product or service delivery of news organizations overcomes this way of thinking? What products or activities could reliably counter it?
What job does journalism actually do?
And not the journalists’ answer — the public’s answer.
What happens before someone becomes a news reader?
Like, what makes a news source the most attractive, preferred, or highest-confidence choice when a person registers an information need?
What or who creates the need for news?
Is all created need manipulation?
Why is the answer to “How do we create more demand for news?” not just “marketing”?
What is the realistic expectation of the average civic participation level that can be achieved through focused programming and media?
Not everyone is going to run for the library trustee position or become a permanent volunteer at Loaves and Fishes. Is this impact goal something empirically determined, or morally?
What makes public life feel worth joining?
All of us are probably on a continuum of “ain’t nobody got time for that” and “sign me up twice” when it comes to social and civic outings and orgs. Maybe everyone’s “tipping point” between sticking to work and home and no more, and a more involved and connected life is different, too? What are the conditions connected to this switch-flipping? Can journalism impact them?
Why do some people enter public life while others withdraw?
What are the actual differences between the loners, the home-bodies, the misanthropes, the never-joiners, and the people who fill their free time with connection, service, and community?
What makes a community curious about itself?
Is it that some places just have no interest in their own history and current composition? Are their communities with an insatiable appetite to know themselves that don’t have a viable local news source?
Can you manufacture curiosity?
Can can journalism incite curiosity?
Is attention a civic resource?
How do we measure our community’s capacity to put attention on the issues and challenges we face? Do we pay more attention if we have a higher perception of our own agency and efficacy?
Is civic curiosity learned?
Did I inherit this sense of civic duty, this belief that it’s both necessary and beneficial, from my parents and education? Have there even been twin studies that look at volunteerism, contributions to charity, voting behavior, or social capital? Do participants in Boy Scouts or 4-H end up more likely to have news figure reliably in their lifestyle?
What has to be true about a place before the news matters?
Does information create civic life, or does civic life create a use for information?
Can you inform your way out of disconnection?
Do renters want local news less, or does nobody make it for them (because, as is, news is mostly for homeowners)?
How long do you have to live somewhere before you care what happens there?
What’s different between a person who moves to town and immediately seeks out a local source for journalism and the person who moves to town and doesn’t?
Is attachment to place a precondition or a product of news demand? Or both?
What's the civic life of a place people pass through?
How does being a college town with a significant cohort of transient students impact public life and efforts to grow it?
Which way does the arrow point — does news fuel people becoming better citizens, or do citizens make more demand for news?
If it's a loop, where do you get in? What programs and techniques could successfully get people on the loop?
If civic capacity and demand are mutually reinforcing, what instrument would let you identify either effect separately?
Are there natural experiments where civic infrastructure arrived without journalism, or journalism without civic infrastructure?
Putnam gave us the correlation between social capital and newspaper readership. Has anyone credibly established direction?
Is journalism purely downstream — an epiphenomenon — of associational life rather than a cause of it?
What's the smallest intervention ever shown to move civic efficacy, and did information have anything to do with it?
If the arrow runs backward, what should a newsroom do differently on Monday? Loops can run in reverse. What does the vicious cycle look like, and is it the same mechanism running backward or a different one?
Is there really a civic ignition point?
This assumes a threshold: below it, effort doesn't take; above it, participation sustains itself. If it's just a metaphor, it's dangerously seductive and distracting.
Is civic life a threshold or a dimmer switch?
Do civic habits have an R-naught (i.e. are they at all contagious)?
How many people have to show up before showing up feels normal?
If civic ignition point is something we can influence, is it a property of individuals and a personal efficacy threshold, or is it about populations and places reaching a critical mass?
This completely changes how you design programming and how you measure its impact. Need to study: Granovetter's threshold models —does civic participation distribute the same way?
What observable would tell you a community has crossed the line of civic ignition — and what would tell you it's slipping back?
Are there communities that crossed and then fell back? What broke?
If the threshold is real, is there a minimum viable dose of journalism below which the money is wasted?
Does the threshold scale with population, or is it roughly a fixed number of committed people regardless of city size?
My instinct says this is not linear, i.e. in bigger cities it’s easier to slough off a sense of civic duty because “plenty of other people will step up.”
"Demand” is doing at least three jobs at once — expressed preference, latent need, and willingness to pay. Is borrowing it from economics smuggling market logic into a public-good argument.
Do people want the news, or do they want what the news is for?
Can you want something you've never experienced?
If demand isn't willingness to pay, what is it — and how do we keep it from becoming an unfalsifiable stand-in for “the public should care more”?
Latent demand is the classic escape hatch of a failing product. What distinguishes real latent demand from wishful thinking?
People can't report demand they don't have. What method gets at it — revealed behavior, diary studies, deprivation experiments?
Is the relevant unit an individual's demand or a community's? Can a community demand something most of its members don't personally want?
Public goods have free-rider problems, not demand problems. Is the demand framing hiding a collective-action problem?
Does the demand frame accidentally blame the public?
This would be ironic, considering I think a lot of people in journalism do blame the public and wonder why people don’t care more about these “important” stories we’re publishing.
Did people ever want local news, or did they want the coupons?
If civic information was historically a byproduct of a commercial bundle, is the right move to rebuild a bundle rather than to build demand?
What was the actual readership of city hall coverage in, say, 1965?
Which is the anomaly to be explained — today's disengagement, or the twentieth century's engagement?
If demand was always thin, does that strengthen the case for public funding over civic capacity work?
Is there a period or a place where demand for local civic information was demonstrably high without a monopoly bundle propping it up?
Does the demand exist, but journalism lost the contract for this job?
People aren't uninformed. They're informed by Facebook groups, group texts, Nextdoor, the barber, the congregation, the school listserv, and now chatbots. Maybe all these are evidence of latent demand, and the answer really is to win it back.
What job is the neighborhood Facebook group doing that your news organization is not?
If demand exists and we lost it, is this a capacity problem or a competition problem?
Informal channels are fast, trusted, and social, but weak on verification and on anything not already salient. Is that a division of labor to complement rather than fight?
This seems to be insanely difficult to model a business around.
If informal channels (social media groups, influencers) beat us on trust, what exactly are we better at — stated without flattering ourselves?
When misinformation spreads faster than a correction, is that a supply failure, an externality of demand, or just “physics”?
Who shows up to the thing you built for the people who don't show up?
How do we get and keep the participation from the people who’ve perpetually been shut out of decision-making and power-sharing?
Which civic programs reach people it wasn't already reaching? What makes them effective at that?
If rational ignorance is genuinely rational at the individual level, is demand-side work an attempt to make people act against their own interest?
What's the difference between lowering the cost of participation and raising its perceived return? Would we be wise to focus on one or the other?
Organizing has a century of practice reaching non-participants. What has journalism refused to learn from it, and why?
What would journalism look like if it were graded on the civic capacity of its community?
Is there evidence that solutions framing changes behavior, or only mood?
Is distrust of the news a media problem of its own or a symptom of something bigger?
Is it realistic that people would trust a newspaper in a town where they don't trust the neighbors?
Is institutional trust downstream of generalized social trust, or are they separately determined? What would distinguish them empirically?
Trust surveys ask about “the media” as an abstraction; people report far higher trust in their own local outlet. Which number is real, and which predicts behavior?
Does earning trust for a newsroom transfer any trust to local government, or does it come at government's expense?
What would have to be true for me to be wrong about news demand?
What evidence would distinguish a demand collapse from a revenue collapse amidst static demand?
News deserts correlate with poverty and low participation. Is that demand-side causation, or just that poor places can't sustain a business?
Are there cases of the reverse — thriving civic life with no local journalism at all? What would that tell us?
How do the recommendations I’d make based on news demand thinking change for rural or urban news operations? How would they change as the scale of a community or population increases? Would it only apply within a certain band?
Was Lippmann right and I just don't like it? Dewey's answer to Lippmann was communication and shared experience, not more facts. Is that an argument for convening over publishing?
Deliberative mini-publics reliably change opinions. Is that evidence that information works, or that structured social experience works and information is incidental?
If capacity matters more than knowledge, should a news organization spend its marginal dollar on reporting at all?
What's the difference between knowing something and being able to act on it, and which one is journalism actually in the business of?
Do people really want a watchdog, or a neighbor?
Which of journalism's values would survive a vote?
If residents ranked journalism's functions themselves, what order would they come out in? Has anyone actually run that study?
Is objectivity a demand-side asset or a demand-side liability in a low-trust community?
What's a proxy for civic capacity that isn't just voter turnout?
Turnout is high-salience, low-frequency, and nationally driven. What's a better behavioral indicator of local civic capacity?
Could we build a place-level civic capacity index from existing data — association density, meeting attendance, local-race turnout, mutual aid, service requests, library use?
Which existing longitudinal datasets already contain most of what I'd need?
If a machine answers every practical question a resident has, the service layer of journalism is commoditized immediately. What remains is whatever requires being physically present, institutionally persistent, and accountable to someone. Is there still a business possible in this world?
Does an answer machine make people more capable, or more dependent?
What happens to demand when the answer costs nothing?
If AI absorbs the service layer of journalism, does the demand-side argument get stronger — because what's left is exactly the relational, convening, presence-based work — or does it collapse?
If AI models are trained on journalism and journalism dies, what do the models know or say about Kalamazoo in 2040?
Does an intermediary that never helps you meet a neighbor produce any of the social conditions my thesis says news demand requires?
Roads, water, and libraries are public infrastructure with public funding and public accountability. What's the argument for treating journalism differently, and does it survive?
If mobility is rising and rootedness falling, is demand-side work swimming against a structural tide?
The mechanisms that build attachment to place — schools,
Discussion