An Invitation to Build the Civic Information Economy
Journalists, cultural workers, content creators, and other trusted messengers are enabling better civic insight for communities. How do we economically support the civic information future that society needs?
By Lillian Ruiz, Simon Galperin, and Jennifer Brandel
This white paper was produced through the News Futures Civic Information Economy Working Group.
What does it take to fund civic information? We often focus on “more money,” but we limit the field’s potential by ignoring better capital design. Today’s landscape often sees dollars concentrated in intermediary and national plays—often with good reason—but without deliberate examination, we risk stifling the imagination of a developing field.
Unexamined capital concentration can look like: default operating models instead of new solutions; emerging revenue models that mimic existing ones; ineffective dynamics where supply and consumer demand aren’t connected; and infrastructure organizations treated as de facto proxies for the field. In this environment, money mostly flows top-down, and new approaches are underfunded because they don’t fit the established ways capital is routed and evaluated.
What would it mean to rethink the economic systems supporting civic information, view sustainability in new ways, explore incentives that reward public outcomes, and build feedback loops that help funders understand the real-world impact? How do we create economic practices that encourage many responsive solutions in an era of polycrisis, rather than fewer?
We propose that a true civic information economy, reframes civic information not just as an evolution of the journalism economy but as an economic sector in its own right. This sector deserves a diverse set of structural incentives to support a multitude of participants and to become sustainable, participatory, and aligned with public needs.
Civic information producers like journalists, cultural workers, content creators and other trusted messengers provide unequivocal value to people’s daily lives. We see a future in which all are fully resourced and sustained, regardless of tax status, size or professional background.
A Question for the Sector
The Media Power Collaborative has been advocating for legislation that treats local news as a public good. Our work is complementary, but ultimately asks a different question:
What would it take to create an “unkillable” civic information sector that thrives creatively and sustainably?
Rather than assuming ongoing public or philanthropic subsidy, how might innovative or repurposed mechanisms across private, philanthropic and public domains open up new ways for civic information to:
Find financial sustainability without monetizing information in harmful or extractive ways.
Support people-centered values, and model this prioritization for other fields
Build a civic information sector that is resilient, creative and rooted in democratic outcomes.
Open Questions
Our call to envision a civic information sector surfaces critical tensions and questions:
Who do we serve? Are we designing for information consumers as passive recipients, or as civic actors whose capacity to act is underutilized and undervalued?
What conditions are we creating? Is the value proposition of the civic information sector tied to its ability to incite action, critique and connection, or something else?
How should incentives function? What gets rewarded in the civic information sector?
What parallels inform us? What can we learn – as playbooks or cautionary tales – from sectors like affordable housing, green energy and public health?
How does this work translate to everyday life and decision-making?
Our goal is ethical market intervention: How do we consult more voices, anticipate unintended consequences and build checks and balances to design a system that incentivizes the development of a cohesive civic information sector?
How can we recalibrate the economic logic that underpins how information is produced, distributed and used? The proposal below explains how we might do that.
Moving to a Civic Information Economy Investment Strategy
1. Understand the Status Quo
In most nonprofit journalism or journalism support systems:
Funding is reactive: It’s given to patch gaps, preserve institutions or fix crises.
Funding is remedial: It’s given to fill technical and business skills that exist in other industries but are underdeveloped in the nonprofit news sector.
Funding is top-down: Funders decide what’s valuable based on what supports their hypotheses.
Funding is individualized: It’s focused on entity-level support, with little investment in higher-level support systems and or R&D.
Funding is often disconnected: There is a limited feedback loop between what’s funded and what the public actually usesor needs in their civic lives.
Supply (what gets produced) and demand (what people engage with or act on) are decoupled. Producers aren’t rewarded for meeting needs, but for meeting grant criteria. In our current moment, philanthropy is often used as a stabilizing force, rather than a catalytic one.
2. Treat Funding as a Market-Shaping Signal
Investments in a civic information economy consider their role in shaping markets.
Funding can signal steering, not just survival.
It’s used strategically to shift behaviors, reward public outcomes and create positive externalities.
For example: Funders could support organizations for demonstrated ability to increase trust and connection, build durable infrastructure, etc.
Use values to reward both sides of the marketplace
Invest in what could make producers and consumers healthy.
For example: Green energy subsidies don’t just patch dirty energy. They accelerate new market structure and reward both producers and consumers for engaging in the green economy.
3. Move from Common Journalism Sector Logic to Civic Information Economy Design
| Common Non-Profit Journalism Organizations | Common Journalism Support Orgs | Civic Information Economy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | Focused on sustaining a single newsroom as a public good | Focused on strengthening institutions via capacity building, funding, and research. Some experience scope creep. | Oriented toward ecosystem and economic design, not institutional maintenance. Recognizes and supports emergent and established forces in civic information's production and distribution, regardless of medium. |
| Measure-ment | Measure success by quantitative metrics: i.e. audience reach, # of impact stories and other measures of funder satisfaction | Measure success by programmatic delivery, regranting and field visibility | Measures success by public outcomes, feedback loop development and value-aligned exchange |
| Ecosystem Positioning | Assert that the newsroom is central to the information ecosystem | Assert that there is no sustainable business model for news | Asserts that the "unkillable newsroom" is not necessarily a newsroom |
| Funding Use | Funding seen as lifeline; innovation funding is hard to access and often small dollar; project funding more common than general operating | Funding flows toward intermediaries; rarely shaped to sustain long-term system health | Funding is treated as a market signal and tool, designed to shape healthy supply and demand |
| Who They Serve | Audiences seen as "people to inform" primarily via content | Stakeholders framed as grantees, partners or practitioners | Consumers framed as civic actors, i.e. people with unmet needs and latent capacity to act |
| What They Make |
Build content pipelines; often lack capacity for deep engagement infrastructure
Journalistic labor is stretched thin, underpaid and often precarious |
Provide toolkits, convenings and field-level data; rarely fund deep engagement or community design
Focus on capacity at org-level, not labor sustainability across the ecosystem |
Build incentives and infrastructure for long-term civic utility; not just content creation, but deeper connection
Centers economic sustainability of public-interest labor (journalism and beyond) |
4. Evaluate What Needs Redesigning
Developing the civic information sector is about reshaping the economic systems that determine how this type of information is distributed and valued. The question facing the field is no longer if public interest information matters, but whether we are willing to confront the economic logic undermining it.
We seek a future where clear economic structures sustain the evolution of civic information from a movement to its own sector. To enable that process, we see a need to focus on:
Economic incentives: Building models where community reputation and accountability translate into tangible value.
Labor dynamics: Supporting sustainable, values-aligned work for information producers and civic intermediaries.
Consumer-side infrastructure: Ensuring the people who struggle the most to find the information they need can participate in redesigning and redefining the information architecture that sustains them.
We advocate for scaffolding for a healthy civic information economy, where outcomes like awareness, participation and increased community strength are both prioritized and rewarded. Without intentional redesign, the future of the sector will be determined by the same fragile models that modern media relies on, even if investment increases.
The progress this deserves will require partnership across philanthropy, public institutions, private capital and operating organizations to move from fragmented interventions to sector design. Together, we can move beyond the status quo and collectively commit to developing civic information as public infrastructure.
News Futures’ Working Groups are bringing into view the possibilities for the civic information economy:
Standards for Information Ecosystem Research is framing rigorous and ethical systems for studying and engaging communities to develop feedback loops. Can these be used to determine what community success and civic information impact look like?
Hierarchy of Information Needs is creating a structural approach for identifying and meeting fundamental human needs through information and communication. How can this be used to design reward and investment incentives for meeting the public good?
Civic Alliances is engaging non-journalistic organizations and spaces where information is produced and shared for community well-being. What are the other nodes in the civic information system, and what do they need to participate in high-quality information production and sharing?
The News Futures Cookbook is identifying best practices for civic information practitioners. How can new standards for civic information production clarify the responsibilities of practitioners and justify systemic investment and support?
5. Join the Conversation
Our case for a civic information sector is the beginning of a process that will require imagination, rigor, and connection across disciplines.
We’re looking for partners to launch a multi-phase research and pilot, exploring analogous models, testing market-shaping interventions, and prototyping incentive systems.
We invite institutions, funders, researchers, and practitioners to partner with us to contribute analysis, models, and experimentation that will make a resilient, participatory, and “unkillable” civic information sector not only imaginable, but inevitable.
If you’re interested in offering feedback or partnering with us, complete this short form, and a member of our working group will be in touch.