After six years of operating behind the scenes, the News Futures collective opened its doors to the public in February — inviting others to join its mission. The group grew from 48 to more than 500 in just over six weeks.
“This is not about saving journalism as it was. It’s about building journalism as it could be,” said Darryl Holliday, lead steward of News Futures and co-founder of Commoner and the award-winning Chicago newsroom City Bureau.
Amid a long-standing crisis in local journalism — with shrinking revenues and closures and a deeper disconnect between journalism and the communities it serves — News Futures offers a space where journalists and civic organizations can build a new case for journalism as a public good.
While groups like Rebuild Local News and the News/Media Alliance push for public funding, News Futures is focused on building a clearer picture of how journalism can serve as civic infrastructure, rooted in mutual respect and responsive to community needs.
The organization’s charter asks members to commit to reimagining journalism as a public good, centering community needs, repairing past harms and including the public in shaping priorities.
“I think the field needs to do more intentional organizing before we really try to make a mass public argument,” said Holliday. “Legacy news is the dominant system, and it's failing in a number of ways. But something better and more tied to community information needs is beginning to take hold.”
A different model for a different time
News Futures began forming quietly with a small group of civic news innovators in 2018. “It’s been around for a bit,” said Holliday. “We spent that incubation time figuring out exactly what we wanted the group to be about. We drafted the charter and thought deeply about how it could grow with purpose — not just for growth’s sake.”
The collective developed a “Hierarchy of News” based on Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” in its first meeting. That set the stage for the work to come.
While the initial group paid for all expenses out of pocket, the effort now has multi-year grants from the Skyline and Luce Foundations and Democracy Fund. Holliday said the goal is not to grow a big infrastructure or compete for grants against newsrooms. He asserted News Futures is not a traditional membership group or nonprofit intermediary. Members don’t pay fees; instead, they become signatories to the charter and join Working Groups led by “Stewards,” where there’s an expectation of contributing to real work.
The team includes Holliday, Megan Lucero as steward of the eight Working Groups, and Sierra Sangetti-Daniels, a journalist and co-founder of the People’s Perception Project, who leads onboarding and Community and Culture work.
Initial priorities include mapping a community of practice, developing tools for newsrooms to reimagine their work, and building ties with other civic institutions like libraries, educators and community groups. Sangetti is amping up the logistical support to begin planning the next meeting, which will be on a much bigger scale than previous meetings. “I’m really focused on ensuring this next event retains the care, openness and trust that the original group created.”
“It’s very strategic because it’s a bunch of really strategic people,” said Sarah Alvarez, founder of Outlier Media, who Holliday credits with the idea for the collective. “But it is also very organic. The most important thing about News Futures is how generative and generous it is. We can do incredible things for and with each other.”
Growing out of a need for community
Alvarez founded Outlier in 2016 in Detroit after leaving her career as a civil rights attorney to pursue journalism. She launched the newsroom to close the gap between traditional newsrooms and the public, pioneering a service-driven model that answers residents’ questions via SMS.
But she found herself isolated in a media ecosystem still dominated by outdated norms of competition and scoops. “I don’t believe you build trust by being first,” she said. “That competitiveness was so disconnected from actual accountability or information needs.”
As she built Outlier, Alvarez found others around the country experimenting with similar community-driven journalism — and facing similar challenges. Many were dismissed as “pet projects,” and funders often prioritized fixing the news business model innovations over public service.
“I’ve always been very focused on the mission and meeting the needs of the community,” she said. “Those of us on the service side shouldn’t be distracted by trying to fix something we didn’t break.”
Instead, she and others in News Futures focused on how to make journalism valuable again to communities, offering new models to meet urgent information needs.
By 2018, Alvarez was exhausted after two years of running Outlier essentially alone on a small grant. She knew others were struggling, too. So, she began reaching out to peers like Holliday to build a support network — not to compete, but to collaborate and strategize together.
“If we were together, it would be less likely that we’d be competing, which was not what any of us wanted. That’s an old paradigm,” Alvarez said.
That early convening grew into News Futures, a community of founders focused on reimagining journalism’s role in civic life, particularly for historically underserved communities.
News Futures operated as a semi-closed network for years, holding online meetups and in-person “unconferences,” where members rented a house and cooked meals together. Growth was slow and intentional in preserving a culture of trust.
Early members included Mike Rispoli of Free Press, Cassie Haynes and Jean Friedman-Rudovsky of Resolve Philly, and Crystal Good, founder of “Black By God.” By 2020, with about 20 regular participants, the group hired Sangetti-Daniels as its first staff member to help operationalize the work.
“When I met Darryl, I’d already been working in what I called ‘civic media,’ trying to bridge newsrooms with education programs,” said Sangetti-Daniels. “I didn't realize there were newsrooms doing this work at this level. I honestly felt like I’d found my people. I want to do that for others too — people who can’t found an organization but still want to create change where they live.”
A structured community of practice
News Futures doesn’t describe itself as a newsroom or an intermediary, but as a “structured community of practice.” Its charter follows a “do-ocratic” model, where ideas move forward through action and experimentation.
“We’re helping build a theory of practice for the field,” Holliday said, “but it’s equally important that we create as we move. We want to put things into practice and see the impact.”
The group has helped incubate projects like the Media Power Collaborative, the Care Collaboratory, the Civic Media Census and the widely shared “hierarchy of information needs” framework. Members also contributed to the “Roadmap for Local News,” a foundational document for Press Forward, the $500 million philanthropic initiative to support local journalism.
“This is a space of belief,” said Alvarez. “There’s so much pessimism in our industry. But News Futures isn’t that space. It’s where people are die-hard believers in the potential of information, connection and informed communities. And it’s had real-world impact.”
The collective’s current work is led by a rotating team of leaders, including past and present members of the Gardening Club, a core organizing group. Key contributors include Sonam Vashi, Courtney Lewis, Lizzy Hazeltine, Cassie Haynes and Heather Bryant.
“We always knew we wanted it to grow, to invite more people and ideas into the conversation. Otherwise, you are just talking to yourselves, and we wanted to expand the work and make an outsized impact,” explained Holliday.
Among the new signatories is John Davidow, a veteran award-winning journalist and newsroom leader who was the managing editor of WBUR, the public radio station in Boston. Davidow now works as a consultant. He said he joined the organization’s “Gardening Club,” a sort of advisory group, after attending a meeting last year.
“I was there for the meeting when they voted on the charter. I was an outsider and never felt like one. The thought, energy, kindness and care for a group of 35-40 people was inspiring. It’s the approach and goals of the work they are doing. Some of them are things I tried to do in my career that were just so hard to do in the systems of those newsrooms. It is an honor to be a part of this,” said Davidow.
Creating civic alliances
As the group enters a new chapter, one of its top priorities is the Civic Alliances Working Group. Led by Gabriel Lerner, the initiative aims to break down silos by inviting civic organizations, including newsrooms, to collaborate with newsrooms.
“One of the most important aspects of News Futures is ensuring newsrooms go beyond their siloed ways of working,” said Holliday. “We need to bring in different civic groups to create a more holistic, community-aligned media ecosystem.”
Unlike many initiatives, News Futures isn’t chasing rapid growth, branding or big fundraising goals. Its aim is lasting collaboration, shared learning and bold thinking about what journalism could become.
But Holliday said the work is urgent: “All systems fade and crumble, and there’s always something emerging under it. You can see people acting as doulas for that new thing. That’s what’s happening right now. And we need it — if we’re going to build something better.”
Diane Sylvester is an award-winning 30-year multimedia news veteran. She works as a reporter, editor and newsroom strategist. She can be reached at diane.povcreative@gmail.com.
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