Reporter’s notebook from the 2026 Local News Summit

In a crisis, “people don’t look for perfect information, they look for actionable information.” That is, they don’t just want to consume the news but use it. With this provoking thought, Amanda Zamora, founder of Agencia Media and a co-founder and former publisher of The 19^th, challenged leaders at a local journalism conference earlier this week to craft a model of news as mutual aid. It was, of course, a very timely challenge.

With both the power of local journalism — and the stakes in our society — painfully in evidence from recent events in Minneapolis, the fifth annual Local News Summit convened in San Antonio. Organized by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism (for which I do some consulting, and for which I wrote this piece) and Aspen Digital, the Summit brought together about 60 leaders in local news, philanthropy, technology, and related fields. Their ranks were somewhat depleted by the week’s big storm, but the discussion remained robust and wide-ranging.

Minneapolis provided the Summit’s rallying cry, as initially articulated by Zamora. Noting the enormous power of open-source video in shaping the perception of recent events, Zamora asserted that rather than be defined by what we choose to record, newsroom leaders would be defined by what they choose to do. Fulfilling this mission, she said, would require news to “decenter itself,” and go beyond documentation alone, to ask readers, listeners, and viewers what they need.

Joel Simon of the City University of New York’s Journalism Protection Initiative noted a historic inversion. Where the press has long held itself out as the eyes and ears of the public, which has served as the basis for its First Amendment constitutional protection, now members of the public, particularly those creating open source video, have become the eyes and ears of the press, enabling the brilliant work done recently by The Minnesota Star Tribune, Bellingcat, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and others. Perhaps, Simon observed, the press now needs to stand up for the public’s free speech rights in this regard, possibly even in the courts. 

Other intriguing thoughts and comments from the Local News Summit included the following:

• There were multiple calls for increased resource sharing across local newsrooms, with BlueLena CEO Daniel Williams suggesting that, in place of the elusive mutual defense network of a “NATO for News,” perhaps a “Red Cross for News” to aid the coverage of challenging situations like ICE surges into cities is needed.
• San Antonio’s own Ashley Alvarado, CEO of Texas Public Radio, focused a discussion of the future of what has been known as “public media” on the reality that it has been “defunded but not deregulated.”  Others observed that even with the outpouring of member support last year, the funding cliff for public media hasn’t been averted — it’s just been pushed back a year, with moments of truth across the country coming later in 2026 as stations see if the support is replicable. 
• Vilas Dhar, president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, issued a stark warning that journalism is in danger of “missing the boat” on fundamental product innovation through artificial intelligence. Dhar insisted that transformation was imperative, as audience behavior is being radically transformed. Other participants pointed out that the obstacles to such innovation are rooted not only in finance and engineering, but also in the conservatism of many newsroom cultures. Other industries are adapting more quickly, some said. Dhar advocated that newsrooms not only make use of the AI tools offered by large platforms but also create their own agentic offerings. 
• The news consumption habits of the next generation were the focus of a new study, “Next Gen News 2” by Jeremy Gilbert, the Knight Professor in Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern’s Medill School. Gilbert said that what has often been termed “news avoidance” in the young is a myth, and that many young people instead find the volume of news, and news choices, overwhelming. Rather than being starved of news, many report that they are drowning in it. Beyond this, Gilbert’s research reveals a generational self-consciousness in shaping their own algorithmic profiles, and he claimed the rising generation of news consumers is actually more media literate than its predecessors. However, he warned, such literacy does not at all necessarily predispose younger consumers to trust traditional news institutions.

The horror of the murders in Minneapolis, of course, hung over the gathering. But the strong response of locally based journalism, and the galvanizing effect on the nation, also offered inspiration. Ours is a moment of tumult in journalism, as it is in the country as a whole. But with challenges also come opportunities, and these too were evident at the San Antonio Summit.

Tofel is principal of Gallatin Advisory and author of the Second Rough Draft newsletter. He is the former president of ProPublica.