"While we continue to do stories that hold our elected officials and community leaders accountable, we know that this is not the most pressing concern for someone who is going through the eviction process."
Public media can absolutely help fix market failures in local news, but it will take a simultaneous process of building on its traditional values and dismantling the legacy structures of the current system to create a new local journalism service worthy of “the public” in public media.
The cultures of public media (nonprofit, built around broadcast, sometimes a little sleepy) and digital news startups (often for-profit, built around text, real-time and a little frenetic) are not the most natural media match. Public media outlets typically the larger and better-financed partner often enter these deals specifically in
hopes of injecting that digital DNA. But the host risks rejecting the transplant if it goes into the process with the wrong attitudes or assumptions about how things will go.