Local news should help Americans build healthy relationships with civic information

This fall, the American Press Institute will convene news leaders, researchers and experts from fields outside journalism, such as applied neuroscience, positive psychology and consumer technology, to consider ways to strengthen local news for a post-feed internet. An internet in which information is abundant and automated, while trusted human relationships, shared experiences and community connection are of highest value.

Digital wellness has become part of how many people think about work, relationships, parenting and mental health.

While digital wellness isn’t a journalism term, the concept may be pushing journalism to rediscover what it has always been for. Local media of any kind, commercial or nonprofit, cannot fulfill their public service mission simply by producing more news and distributing more information, because people are actively changing their relationship with technology and information to fit their lived needs. Instead, we must consider what — or how — local news would be if its goal were to help people become sufficiently informed, not maximally engaged.

People dip in and out of the news cycle. Many have a regular digital hygiene routine and curate their feeds based on their own life seasons. They sample products and cancel, unsubscribe or unfollow out of habit. They listen secondhand, follow creators, skim headlines. They pause. They get interrupted or self-distracted. They return. There is no Sunday morning reading habit, any more than there’s a 5:00 broadcast before family dinner.

These behaviors don’t necessarily describe a population abandoning news. They describe people actively managing their relationship with it. So, maybe we ought to be asking what helps people embrace the news, rather than why they avoid it?

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