Building civic conditions for local news in the Great Lakes

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This is the project statement I submitted in my application for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship in February 2026. I am excited to begin studies to continue this thread at the University of Michigan in the fall, and this is where it starts. I hope I can intrigue you enough to follow along during the fellowship.

Much of the effort to “save journalism” over the past two decades has focused on supply-side innovation: new reporting approaches, formats, platforms, and technologies. These efforts are thoughtful and often valuable. Yet they share an implicit assumption: that demand for journalism is largely fixed, waiting to be better served if news organizations can find the right product.

My central hypothesis challenges that assumption. I propose that journalism’s crisis is not only nor primarily a supply problem, but a demand problem rooted in upstream social, civic, and economic systems that shape whether people seek, value, and know how to use journalism in the first place. Journalism demand, in other words, is socially produced.

This perspective reframes news engagement as a behavioral arc with a “before” and an “after.” The “before” is the moment when a person becomes curious or concerned enough to seek information — a “civic ignition point.” The “after” is what happens once a person encounters journalism: whether it leaves people oriented, capable, and empowered, or overwhelmed, alienated, and inert. Journalism has historically focused on the moment of attention itself, while neglecting both the upstream conditions that generate information-seeking behavior and the downstream pathways that translate awareness into agency.

A Knight-Wallace Fellowship would allow me to transform this theory into a practical, field-ready framework for local news organizations, with particular relevance for Great Lakes communities facing persistent civic disengagement and declining local media capacity.

My work would synthesize research across journalism studies, political behavior, education, behavioral science, and information economics to articulate a model of journalism demand as an emergent property of broader civic systems. I would translate that model into diagnostic tools that help local news organizations assess which demand conditions are present or absent in their communities. And I would design organizational implications — structures, programs, and workstreams that allow newsrooms to invest in demand-building activities alongside traditional reporting.

The University of Michigan offers an unusually strong environment for this inquiry. I plan to engage the School of Information’s work on ICTs, social change, and information economics; the Department of Communication and Media’s MaPiEL Lab and Politics and Communication Lab; and campus initiatives including the Initiative for Democracy and Civic Empowerment, the Edward Ginsberg Center’s Pathways to Civic Engagement, Engaged Michigan, and the Ford School’s engaged learning programs. The Institute for Social Research would provide methodological grounding for connecting community-level conditions to individual behavior.

As co-director of the Local Journalism Foundation and NowKalamazoo, I will use my organization as a Great Lakes testbed for this work and seek feedback and collaborators among colleagues in the region.

The aim is not to ask journalists to abandon journalism, but to equip the field with a clearer understanding of when journalism can succeed, why it often struggles, and how news organizations can intentionally operate at the boundary between information and civic capacity. In an era of democratic fragility, this work seeks to reposition journalism not only as a producer of news, but as a participant in the conditions that make news matter.