Q&A and Reading List from Narratives for Media Reform

Written By Sarah Lawrence

By Carla Murphy, kate harloe, Megan Lucero

Edited by Gracie McKenzie



The Narratives for Media Reform Working Group at News Futures set out to envision a publishing and storytelling wing of the growing civic media movement—one that seeds, funds and supports the publication and distribution of media about both the future of local news and the structural and cultural shifts required to usher in civic media. We spent the last year thinking through how to execute that vision. We’ve narrowed our focus to building and demonstrating power in the short term, and supporting or helping to platform culture work (place-based and online) that aligns with the News Futures vision, values and norms.

One project that emerged is an ongoing partnership with the publication The Objective.

In late 2025, News Futures, Free Press and The Objective co-published “It’s Time for Civic Media.” The online series and print magazine shares 14 practitioners’ perspectives on how, over the next decade, we can build local, participatory and durable information systems. 

This series demonstrates the strategy of concentrating individual News Futures voices into a collective publishing effort to achieve greater impact. Producing content is insufficient. We aim to be heard. While we encourage individual News Futures members to publish broadly in trade and general interest outlets, there are trade-offs to doing so in an atomized, fractured and overwhelming information environment. There’s a risk of diluting the impact of our ideas or spending disproportionate time explaining, as compared to generating intentional conversations that build and attract material resources. At this foundation-stage in our growth, we may be better served by making an event of our “speech” about civic media. A stand-alone magazine in both digital and print accomplishes this.

Below, you’ll find: 

  • A Q&A with Working Group co-stewards Carla Murphy and kate harloe on how News Futures got to this point and what we’re still learning and exploring

  • Provocations and reading lists for civic media movement workers interested in narrative work towards media reform

Q&A with Stewards Carla Murphy and kate harloe

News Futures: What are the origins of the Narrative for Media Reform Working Group? And what role does this narrative work play in the civic media movement? 

The idea for the Narratives for Media Reform Working Group at News Futures (NF) grew out of a couple of hunches. The first was that, as civic media practitioners, we need to not only do the work, but effectively tell the story of the work we’re doing.

The second was that people working within our field and beyond are hungry for new stories about what journalism is and could be. 

Our conception of the “narrative work” that the civic media movement must do sits somewhere at the intersection of these two hunches. Put simply: We need to set the terms of debate around what local news is and what it could be. 

To that end, the Narratives Working Group has been envisioning a kind of publishing-storytelling-narrative wing of our civic media movement—one that might seed, fund and support the publication and distribution of media (writing, videos, TikToks, etc.) about the future of news and the structural/cultural shifts required to usher in civic media. One goal is to articulate a culturally relevant, exciting vision for civic media that helps people to feel they are part of this movement.

News Futures: What experiments led to the partnership with The Objective? What did you learn that informed the need to build collections, series and magazines as an organizing principle?

We are seeking to build power. Centrally, in an overwhelming information environment, we can better “break through the noise” with collective action than with single articles or interviews, even if the latter are placed in elite or well-established outlets. Publishing in non-aligned outlets dilutes our power. Our limited energy is best spent by owning the terms of the debate.

This can be accomplished in all sorts of ways. Some examples: magazine take-overs; producing a series and marketing it as an “event;” collections; etc.

One place to start is with News Futures itself. For years, News Futures’ Working Groups have incubated new stories about the field in which we work. For example, a previous Media Policy Working Group led to the formation of the Media Power Collaborative, which in 2024 published this policy agenda articulating a story of journalism as a public good.

But beyond News Futures, members are also exploring all sorts of ways to publish, influence policy and magnify cultural conversations around reimagining local news. For a living collection of the writing civic media practitioners are publishing, see the “Provocations and Readings” portion of this article—specifically the section titled “Narrative work from News Futures members: Examples.”


News Futures: What narratives and strategies are the New Futures community calling for? What is emergent and on the horizon for narratives that need to be told?

We surveyed News Futures members twice over the past two years. Through the first survey, we wanted to better understand how practitioners think about the narrative work before us, and what they think is most important when it comes to this side of our movement. 

For example, we asked: 

“What is a current, dominant or recurrent narrative about the journalism/media sector that you’d like News Futures or a News Futures member to respond to? This may be a media-related story, discursive pattern or meme that annoys or provokes you.” 

Here are an assortment of the replies that we received:

We want to push back on narratives that entrench power, including…

  • “Local news is dying and not pertinent, and we need mass media to make change.”

  • “That [local news] is dying. Not a place for employment. And biased.”

  • “That new nonprofit media organizations are ‘fixing’ the deeper issues of equity, representation and empowerment across the media sector. These orgs feel like a return to the status quo of white, wealthy men dominating the media sector, rather than bringing much needed change.”

  • “The idea that journalism should be profitable.”

  • “That the public still feels TV news is ‘the media.’”

  • “That there's any publication/outlet anywhere that is objective and that ‘balance’ is an inherent good.”

  • “The habits of superiority and binary thinking in journalism and journalism-adjacent orgs; helplessness and overwhelm; funding of journalism-adjacent people orgs (myself included) vs. actual journalists and community engagers (and the pay gap between these two sets of people).”

  • “For a public audience: ‘Local news is fake/not important/bad.’ I feel like other groups (like more traditional media) have been more focused on collectively responding to this than our groups have been. Would love to see an NF-generated, public-facing campaign that we could all implement in our local contexts that's rooted in our values and vision.”

We want to hold traditional journalism accountable for past failures…

  • “Media that protects the status quo rather than questioning, challenging and offering stories that counter genocide, capitalism, racism, etc.”

  • “The idea that big tech is solely responsible for the demise of local newspapers.”

  • “The idea of ‘saving’ local news, as if it was always a sustainable business model and as if it was always trying to serve everyone in the community.”

  • “Journalism is a noble pursuit that requires deference and should not be questioned. It's not said like this, but it's how legacy media operates. However, journalism the for-profit industry and journalism the civic service are entirely different operations and the conflation of the two is a key component to the failures of contemporary journalism.”

  • “When people who work in newsrooms shame their fellow community members for not paying for news, as if that alone would ‘save’ the local publication.”

  • “The old crank about a ‘pipeline problem’ rather than poverty wages, class exclusion and un-survivable working conditions in journalism.”

  • “The concept that public policy should support news outlets (rather than support a more expansive and equitable way that communities can be more informed and engaged, a la the NJ Civic Info Consortium). This dominant narrative has led to bills in CA that are shaped by publishing industry lobbyists, and to gate keeping by publishers who want to determine the definition of a news outlet or a journalist and that stifle innovation.”

We want to lift up new ideas for a better civic media sector, such as…

  • “We have to realize that the public at large does not have a concept of ‘journalism’ that people in our field do—so we can't appeal to it. Instead we have to make the case for it, and that means backing way up to reconstruct what civic media, local information, documenting, verifying, etc. could mean for communities now.”

  • “I'd like to see more narratives respond to the news desert concept. I have heard grassroots community organizers critique the implied notion that communities have no legitimate means to gather and share news and information without traditional newsrooms.”

  • “The future of local news involves more than nonprofits.”

  • “We, as journalists and civic media producers, need to focus more on how we can produce news and information in more responsive ways that genuinely connect with people and help them understand how things work and what they can do to change them—especially those who have long been ignored, marginalized and harmed by legacy media outlets.”

 

Another question we asked was: 

“What aspect of this work do civic media practitioners think is most important to focus on in the next 3-5 years?” 

We gave respondents options such as:

  • Influencing policy in key states

  • Influencing cultural conversations, outside of journalism/civic media, about media

  • Influencing power centers within the journalism/civic media space

  • Producing or translating academic research that supports News Futures vision for non-academic audiences

  • Supporting media that targets younger Millennials and Gen Z

  • Influencing power centers in policy, social justice and politics about the relevance of civic media

Of the practitioners we surveyed, an overwhelming ~76% picked “influencing cultural conversations outside of journalism and civic media” as the number one priority. In second place, about 65% of practitioners said they wanted to see our movement focus on “influencing power centers in policy, social justice and politics about the relevance of media.”

These findings, reiterated in responses across the survey, clarified that civic media practitioners believe some of the most important narrative work ahead is outside of our fields, rather than influencing our colleagues—even powerful people or organizations—within journalism and civic media.

News Futures: Carla, you’ve been a strong advocate for civic media practitioners keeping their attention focused on culture. Can you explain why you see culture as so central to the narrative work ahead? 

Culture is powerful because it’s all the stuff that we take for granted, as plain-old “common sense.” It’s not debatable. Like breathing or the weather, no appointment is needed for its consumption or reference 

Examples:

  • Detroit’s Wright Museum’s IG post series uses Black cultural references, without naming them as such, to market their offerings. It’s more so, IYKYK. This campaign caught the attention of Michael Harriot’s Contraband Camp. 

  • Working Group contributor Katherine Abbott highlighted a The Massachusetts Review literary essay “Carriacou Man.” In a homage to her husband’s Grenadian stories, Jan Claussen, a white woman born in the Pacific Northwest, likens story security to food security. She asks: “So what would it mean to demand, enhance, promote “story security” for the planet at large?” And, “What would it take to value not just stories themselves but the range of conditions friendly to their emergence?”

  • The sugar cane field that opened Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX Halftime show prompted viewers to reflect on how the crop links all of “America.” That supported the artist’s name-check, minutes later, of all the hemisphere’s countries, pushing back on the idea that only the U.S. is “America.”

Broadly, the News Futures community’s narrative strength lies in practitioner storytelling and policy. We are wonky. That is our culture. A key goal then, is to build partnerships in arts and culture spaces that do similar work or hold similar objectives, but use different language, frameworks, entry points, humor, etc. This means moving News Futures into media that is culturally-relevant, native to and/or is already used by a particular place-based community.

In terms of execution, though—and this is key—the aim is not to bring on Culture X to publicize News Futures talking points in their spheres of influence, i.e. a work-for-hire relationship. The aim is organically aligned partnership. 

We’re not talking about News Futures building bridges or planting particular ideas for others to communicate or translate cross-culturally. We’re talking about platforming, pulling up and helping to make visible the civic media work that is already happening within culture, all the time. For example, one strategy might be to say to a creator, “Hey, we’ll give you $10,000 to do your thing on this civic-media-related topic or theme or provocation. We want to see what you come up with.”

We are looking for recommendations for partnerships particularly from within YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and in non-English language spaces. One group that comes to mind immediately is Critical Minded, which was incubated by Allied Media Project. Another is Mary Louise Schumacher, the director of Out of the Picture (2024) about the loss of cultural criticism in local news. On YouTube, Cam James, comes to mind. On Substack, Van Lathan.

 

Have partnership recommendations? Please send them to Carla at carla.m.murphy@gmail.com

Provocations and readings for the civic media movement

One of the first things we ran into when considering narrative change was: We have to better define certain core terms and ideas.

This may sound like a pedantic or esoteric takeaway, but the journalism field—including newsrooms, higher ed institutions like graduate journalism schools and undergraduate journalism programs and all the ancillary organizations that exist in our industry—talk about journalism in ways that are notoriously vague. Even within the academy, the foundational “theories” that are supposed to define journalism practice are weak—and heavily critiqued as barely being “theories” at all.

This doesn’t mean we need to venture deep into the academy to do this work, though some of us may. It also doesn’t mean that we need to talk about journalism or civic media in ways that are overly complicated. It simply means that the terms, definitions, principles and values that many of us frequently invoke to talk about our work are poorly defined. If we look closely, many of us aren’t talking about the same thing even when we’re using the same terms. 

(Carla: “I do think a simple answer to the lack of shared definitions means that we each must remind ourselves to always define our terms. Make a mental habit to do so, and we can help each other with that by asking people to define their terms for the rooms we're in.”)

Over two years of running this working group, we spoke to a lot of News Futures members as well as non-members who work in relevant fields. Here are some of the terms that they told us are foundational to building a new kind of journalism and civic media movement. 

 

Theory of change 

Mainstream journalism says it has no theory of change, but having no theory of change is itself a theory of change. So what’s going on here? Many people we spoke with argued that it is essential for us to get clear on what journalism’s theory of change is and should be. Here are a range of readings and resources on this topic that News Futures members shared with us this year. 


As is to be expected in a diverse, multicultural, multidisciplinary movement: Not all News Futures members agreed that defining a “theory of change” should take top priority! One member wrote: “I've become opposed to the concept of theory of change because of all the risks around messaging expectations that have distorted the work and how its value gets measured (esp. international ‘development’ media funding and philanthropic media funding), and trying to socialize a concept of theory of service to acknowledge and account for the agency of beneficiaries of information in terms of what they do with it.”

 

Theory of Power 

“Nothing produces deer-in-the-headlights moments for activists in the United States like the question “What’s your theory of power?””

—Jane McAlevey

From our perspective, a theory of power is even more important than a theory of change. In a News Futures Slack exchange, member Bernardo H. Motta wrote: “I recommend adding a theory of power (who has power, how is power shared, etc.) into the theory of change, because that is missing in almost all theories of change I have seen in journalism. Without changing power relations, you can't change anything else.” 

Yet, you are unlikely to hear the phrase “theory of power” mentioned almost anywhere in the journalism industry. It’s also rare to encounter the term in the civic media field. The best definition for “theory of power” we have so far encountered is in the late labor organizer and writer Jane McAlevey’s book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.  “Nothing produces deer-in-the-headlights moments for activists in the United States like the question “What’s your theory of power?”” McAlevey wrote.

McAlevey’s writing culminates in a chart which describes three different theories of power: The advocacy model, favored by liberals; the mobilizing approach, favored by progressives; and the organizing model, favored by the left. For more detail on these theories of power and their accompanying “options for change,” see the chart below.

 
Advocacy Mobilizing Organizing
Theory of Power Elite. Advocacy groups tend to seek one-time wins or narrow policy changes, often through courts or back-room negotiations that do not permanently alter the relations of power. Primarily elite. Staff or activists set goals with low to medium concession costs or, more typically, set an ambitious goal and declare a win, even when the "win" has no, or only weak, enforcement provisions. Back-room, secret deal making by paid professionals is common. Mass, inclusive, and collective. Organizing groups transform the power structure to favor constituents and diminish the power of their opposition. Specific campaigns fit into a larger power-building strategy. They prioritize power analysis, involve ordinary people in it, and decipher the often hidden relationship between economic, social, and political power. Settlement typically comes from mass negotiations with large numbers involved.
Strategy Litigation; heavy spending on polling, advertising, and other paid media. Campaigns run by professional staff, or volunteer activists with no base of actual, measurable supporters, that prioritize frames and messaging over base power. Staff-selected "authentic messengers" represent the constituency to the media and policy makers, but they have little or no real say in the strategy or running the campaign. Recruitment and involvement of specific, large numbers of people whose power is derived from their ability to withdraw labor or other cooperation from those who rely on them. Majority strikes, sustained and strategic nonviolent direct action, electoral majorities. Frames matter, but the numbers involved are sufficiently compelling to create a significant earned media strategy. Mobilizing is seen as a tactic, not a strategy.
People Focus None. Grassroots activists. People already committed to the cause, who show up over and over. When they burn out, new, also previously committed activists are recruited. And so on. Social media are over relied on. Organic leaders. The base is expanded through developing the skills of organic leaders who are key influencers of the constituency, and who can then, independent of staff, recruit new people never before involved. Individual, face-to-face interactions are key.
 

Where, on this chart, does journalism fall? When we ask different groups of people, we get different answers. 
From our perspective, traditional journalism falls squarely within the advocacy model: Reporters discover an abuse of power or a policy that could help people and find “subjects” to interview—people whose experiences prove the abuse of power or prove why a new policy would be helpful. Reporters then choose anecdotes from the subjects’ stories, which they use to make the case to consumers or readers that an abuse of power has occurred or that a new policy is needed. Peoples’ stories are packaged as case studies in the hopes that people who can change policy or hold power to account will read them and decide to act.

For those of us in the civic media field: What theory of power do we want to advance?

Beyond McAlevey’s book, here are a collection of other resources that may be helpful in thinking about theories of power within journalism.

 

Have readings to add to this list or reactions to this framework for theories of power? We’d love to hear from you. Email kate harloe with your recommendations at kate.harloe@gmail.com. 

Narrative versus truth 

When we first started this working group two years ago, we called it “narratives for media reform.” We were interested in how to tell the story of the civic media movement to place-based communities—and in thinking through the sort of publishing or storytelling wing our movement needs for this audience.

However, asking a question about the narratives required to create public awareness of civic media led us straight to a provocation. We wondered: Are our place-based communities best served by the pursuit of narrative or the pursuit of truth?

Since the early 2010s, “narrative change” has become a primary vehicle through which philanthropies pursue social change on a wide range of issues. This cottage industry, buoyed by deep-pocketed philanthropies, is distinct but not separate from the nascent civic information movement. In fact, many civic information organizations that produce journalism (e.g. Documented NY, Colorlines) receive funding from issue-focused, “narrative change” funding streams. These same “narrative change” funding streams have also flowed to commercial news organizations, i.e. NBC News to cover Inequality/Poverty; the Guardian to cover Climate Change; etc.

We began to suspect that the conflation of “narrative change”-work with journalism, and vice versa causes confusion not only for those of us working in the civic media, journalism and democracy fields but also, our audiences of ordinary working people. 

In our second year of this working group, we started to think about how to define the commonly-used terms that inform obligations to our local audiences—because they also shape audience expectations of “civic media.” For example: “community,” “narrative,” “truth,” “diverse,” etc. 

Here are an assortment of readings we’ve referenced on this topic:

Narrative work from News Futures members: Examples

The writing listed here is not local journalism, but writing about local journalism and the civic media field, broadly:

Sarah Lawrence
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