Regional civic media trusts are a promising model for durable, community-governed support for the filmmakers, journalists, public media, community media, and cultural organizations that keep communities informed, connected, and culturally vibrant. We're convening six regional cohorts to examine this model and the funding and governance mechanisms that could make it possible.
Civic media is the work that helps communities understand themselves, preserve cultural memory, encounter perspectives beyond their own, and make sense of the world together. The people who create this work — and the communities that depend on it — both have a stake in sustaining it.
Reliable, locally grounded information and reporting that communities can use.
Documenting the stories and histories that define a place.
Perspectives, experiences, and creative voices that consolidated or commercial systems often overlook.
Creating opportunities for people to understand complex issues, encounter one another, and participate in community life.
Any future public funding mechanism would require public trust and democratic participation. Whether through voter approval, public policy, or another locally appropriate approach, communities should have a meaningful voice in deciding what public-interest storytelling they value, how it is supported, and how the institutions distributing those resources remain accountable.
For decades, documentary film, local journalism, public media, arts organizations, libraries, and cultural institutions have largely pursued separate solutions to common challenges. Today, however, they increasingly face the same structural pressures: declining local investment, market concentration, shrinking public funding, rapid technological change, and growing barriers to reaching audiences.
Although each serves different functions, they all help communities understand themselves, preserve culture, share trusted information, and participate in civic life.
Civic Media 2.0 explores what becomes possible when these sectors learn across fields and help shape the funding, governance, and public infrastructure that supports public-interest storytelling and civic life.
Civic Media 2.0 is a framework for rethinking how communities support independent storytelling and civic life. It recognizes that documentary film, journalism, public media, arts and cultural organizations, libraries, and other civic institutions increasingly rely on many of the same public policies, funding systems, governance structures, and community relationships.
By broadening how we think about civic media, the framework invites a wider range of institutions into conversations about the future of civic infrastructure. Through six regional civic media cohorts, leaders from these fields will learn from one another, identify shared opportunities, and explore funding, governance, and policy approaches that can strengthen a broader ecosystem of public-interest storytelling — while supporting the distinct missions each serves within its community.
Communities depend on a diverse ecosystem of institutions to inform, connect, and reflect public life — from local newsrooms and public media stations to documentary filmmakers, community media, arts organizations, libraries, cultural institutions, and independent exhibitors.
Yet these fields have largely been organized, funded, and governed separately, even as they confront many of the same structural pressures: market concentration, declining local investment, shrinking or politically vulnerable public funding, changing audience behavior, rapid technological disruption, and growing barriers to reaching the public.
Important work is already underway within each field. What is often missing are opportunities to examine the broader infrastructure these institutions depend on, learn from models developed in adjacent sectors, and consider how funding, governance, and policy strategies might be adapted across different regional contexts.
The challenge is not a lack of innovation within individual sectors. It is the absence of durable systems — and too few opportunities to learn across them.
Public and philanthropic resources are often short-term, sector-specific, or vulnerable to political and economic shifts.
A shrinking number of platforms, distributors, buyers, and intermediaries increasingly determine what work is financed, circulated, and discovered.
Journalism, film, public media, and arts policy are frequently developed separately, even when the underlying challenges overlap.
Communities may recognize the need for new infrastructure but lack accessible models, research, organizing tools, and governance guidance for putting ideas into practice.
Civic Media 2.0 creates a shared inquiry into how communities might build more durable, locally responsive systems of support.
What if communities could build something different: lasting, locally governed funding for public-interest storytelling, with the power to decide for themselves how it's invested?
A regional civic media trustpools public dollars and puts distribution in the hands of community representatives, region by region. Versions of this already sustain arts and culture across the country, so the model isn't hypothetical. We want to adapt that formula for civic media and independent film.
Learn what it takes to lift off a voter-approved tax measure, the same kind of dedicated public funding that already sustains arts and culture in regions across the country.
Advocate for community carve-outs from digital advertising revenue, so dollars that once circulated through local media stop leaking out to a handful of platforms.
Trusts governed by community representatives, region by region. The funding stays stable, hard for politics to capture, and close to the people doing the work.
The goal is deepening public commitment to pilot new local funding models — for investigative reporting, independent documentary, cultural storytelling, impact campaigns, and the distributors and exhibitors bringing this work to community audiences — with mechanisms that fit each region's political, cultural, and economic context.
Six stages, from understanding the idea to building it in your region. Editorially picked, with a sentence on why each resource is here. Pick what's useful, leave the rest.
Framing reads that explain why civic media is infrastructure, and what's at stake.
Shorenstein Center
The series opener. If we designed public media from scratch for this moment, what would it be?
Open →Shorenstein Center
Reframes public-interest media as civic infrastructure: hubs that connect communities, not legacy broadcasters or isolated nonprofits.
Open →Shorenstein Center
Why consolidation is an infrastructure decision, and how platform-era revenue and voter-authorized funding could rebuild what's been lost.
Open →Shorenstein Center
The regional design. How state policy experiments and cultural funding models point toward a new infrastructure for public-interest media.
Open →Case studies of voter-approved funding and community governance already in the field.
More resources coming soon.
How ballot measures and dedicated public funding actually pass.
More resources coming soon.
Participatory grantmaking, community boards, and trust structures that hold up over time.
More resources coming soon.
Organizing playbooks and messaging tools for the work of persuading.
More resources coming soon.
Original tools — the part you can't Google. Reach back here when you're ready to act.
More resources coming soon.
Six cohorts are organized around the country's existing regional cultural map. Each will bring together leaders from documentary film, journalism, public media, arts and culture, libraries, community media, philanthropy, policy, and civic organizations to study relevant models and consider their regional context. The starting point is not to prescribe or build a trust, but to learn together: how durable public-interest funding works, how it earns public support, how it can be governed accountably, and what lessons may be transferable across fields.
Why these six? The regions mirror the footprint of the nation's Regional Arts Organizations: longstanding cultural networks with deep regional relationships and experience administering publicly and philanthropically supported programs. Using this map allows the cohorts to draw from existing cultural infrastructure while inviting participation from a broader civic media ecosystem. Regional groupings may shift as the cohorts are confirmed.
What cohorts learn together
How public goods receive durable support. Ballot measures, dedicated taxes, appropriations, special districts, trusts, and other mechanisms communities use to fund shared resources.
How public resources are governed. Structures that build accountability, distribute decision-making, protect independence, and earn public trust.
Lessons from arts and culture. How cultural districts, regional arts systems, public funding programs, and participatory grantmaking have sustained institutions over time.
Lessons from journalism and public media. Emerging approaches to civic-information funding, public-service media, local ownership, and community accountability.
Where current systems fall short. The financing, distribution, access, preservation, and capacity gaps affecting independent film, local media, cultural organizations, and community storytelling.
What may be possible regionally. Which elements of existing models could be adapted, combined, tested, or further researched within each region.
Meeting virtually, each cohort will study relevant models, identify regional conditions and gaps, and discuss which funding and governance approaches merit further exploration.
Virtual working sessionsRepresentatives from each region will compare findings, surface common questions, examine important differences, and identify opportunities for continued research and coordinated action.
The report will synthesize what the cohorts learned: regional infrastructure gaps, promising models and case studies, governance and funding considerations, areas requiring further research, and practical next steps for communities interested in continuing the work. The aim is to give communities a clearer foundation for deciding whether — and how — to pursue locally appropriate civic media infrastructure.
Public report & roadmapWe're recruiting cohort members, advisors, researchers, and partners with experience in documentary film, journalism, public media, arts and culture, libraries, community media, public policy, philanthropy, civic engagement, funding mechanisms, and community governance.
You do not need to arrive with a proposed solution. We are looking for people who can contribute regional knowledge, sector expertise, lived experience, relevant case studies, or thoughtful questions about how communities support public-interest storytelling.