This essay series was originally published in the Columbia Journalism Review.
This is a moment of profound urgency for journalists as the Trump administration breaks long-standing norms, attacks major news organizations in the courts and from the briefing room, and blocks access to reporters.
The challenges are particularly acute for local news organizations that have long struggled with business sustainability, digital transformation, and reader growth. Now they are facing a new set of concerns as increasing audience polarization and legal and regulatory attacks on independent journalism have taken root.
With these conditions as backdrop, about a hundred local news leaders met in New Orleans in late January for the fourth annual Local News Summit, hosted by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism and Aspen Digital. Summit participants—including from large urban news enterprises and small rural shops; for-profit, nonprofit, and public media; academia; and tech—resolved to better serve communities with fact-based news.
Meeting just ten days after the inauguration, there was a palpable sense—not unique to the news business—of an industry caught on its back foot by the pace and intensity of Trump administration executive action, some of it aimed at the heart of local news. On the summit’s second day, during a session on threats to journalists and journalism, our phones buzzed with push alerts about an FCC plan to investigate sponsorship underwriting at NPR and PBS.
“An attack on one is an attack on all.”– Eric Meyer, Marion County Record Publisher
Amid these challenges, there was a deeply felt commitment to reinvention and collaboration. Participants advanced the idea of a “NATO for News” and other forms of collective action—inspired in part by the strong response after a 2023 police raid of the Marion County Record, a family-owned Kansas weekly. “An attack on one,” Record publisher Eric Meyer said at the summit, “is an attack on all.”
