Information isn’t enough. It’s time for news with social utility.

Hello! Please excuse my much longer than expected break from sending these dispatches. It has, in fact, been months. Thanks for your patience, and I’m happy to be writing again.

I’m going to jump right in and get back to working through ideas and strategies we might use together to make a transition to high-value, needs-focused news more likely and widespread. This post is a little long, so I've included summaries at the beginning of each section in italics written by ChatGPT 5 and heavily edited by me.

I would especially appreciate your feedback this week because this is an abstract idea I’d like to make more concrete. Tell me what resonates, what feels too vague, or where you disagree with my assumptions or conclusions.

You can hit reply or get in touch with me at alvarez.sarah@temple.edu. Thank you to the News Futures working group on information needs, who have already been bouncing around ideas and concepts on increasing the value of news for the past few months. They have helped me clarify my thinking. 

When my benefit depends on your needs being met, too

Essential services create more value when everyone’s needs are met. Does journalism have the potential to move beyond serving individuals and toward creating shared, group-level utility?

My family moved to Philadelphia at the start of a withering heat wave and a citywide sanitation worker strike. It only took a few days for the humidity in the air to trap the reek of baking garbage and make it oppressive along our block and through the neighborhood. My first conversations with my new neighbors were all about garbage. Echoing the sentiment across the city, my neighbors wanted the mayor to hurry and meet the workers’ demands. 

The city opened up temporary dumps for residents during the strike. But making people get rid of the garbage on their own just made the need for sanitation work more obvious. Sure, most Philly residents would rather not have to take their garbage to the dump. But this isn’t the only reason the workers had so much support. This is where the question of utility got interesting for me and, I think, could be helpful to us who care about informing our communities. 

The “social utility” of sanitation work is as important as its individual benefits. The individual benefit of trash collection was bound up in all residents having their needs met. Until everyone was able to once again have their trash collected each week, the streets would stink and the pests would multiply. Piecemeal pickups and temporary dumps would never cut it. 

Residents easily understood the dynamic. They demanded the city negotiate with the workers in strong and imaginatively colorful terms The city and the union negotiated a new contract after an eight-day strike and lots of negotiation. Trash collection is now back to normal, and the streets are back to stinking only intermittently.   

Can we help news achieve this degree of social utility? Could the way we use information to provide a service our communities would recognize as being fundamentally important to them as a group, not just something individuals use to inform themselves or meet their own goals?

My working assumption is that news and reporting don’t often create much social utility. News and reporting do matter and often create significant and real-world change. ProPublica’s fantastic annual report is a great example. But especially as the issues we reporting on get more complex, the real-world impacts are too few.

During the sanitation worker strike, local news made it easy to get good information. It was easy to find the locations of dump sites and what the workers and the mayor’s office thought was at stake in the negotiations. But crucially, the mayor and the union both seemed to negotiate in good faith. What if the dynamics had been different, though? What if one of these parties was not acting in good faith, or if the money to pay workers really wasn’t there, or if both parties were unresponsive to what residents wanted? Would a news organization's coverage be any different in these hypothetical situations as the trash piled up and all residents, workers, and officials started to turn on each other? Could a news organization aid in productive problem solving? Or would they just cover an escalating crisis? 

Overinformed and underequipped

Newsrooms reliably fill information gaps that help individuals but struggle to address systemic problems—often leaving communities overwhelmed and not equipped to use information to address collective challenges like climate change or corruption.

Using news and information to help our communities actually confront issues might not be possible. Or, it might be a design problem. News has long been designed for individual consumption, and therefore it most often conveys an individual benefit. This focus on the individual is what makes driving up the social utility of news hard. Maybe it’s the invisible hand of the advertising model at work or just a natural result of how information flows.

Our individual focus does not help our communities productively engage with issues they care about but can't solve by themselves. A Pew Research Center study from a few years ago asked wide-ranging questions about climate change to people across the United States. A 71% majority said climate change causes harm, but when asked what can be done about this harm, only 27% thought their individual actions could make a big difference. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Pew found only 21% had participated in individual climate action—things like donating money or even going to a protest—a number that had declined in the few years since their last survey. 

I don’t want news to abandon our audiences to the mistaken belief they are ineffective. There are some examples of journalists helping people work together toward shared outcomes. But I can't think of many outside of movement journalism, the many Documenters programs around the country, and the regular pre-election voter education plenty of newsrooms do. 

Newsrooms and the communities we serve are overinformed but underequipped when it comes to complex problems. 

I struggled with this problem in my newsroom for years without being able to put my finger on what drove the dynamic.

Newsrooms that use an information needs framework have the experience of being really useful. We can consistently find and address individual needs like helping people to identify and avoid housing scams, steer clear of local employers with a history of wage theft, or know when to get out of the way of wildfires, for example. 

On the other hand, when reporting led us to harm caused by something like corruption, entrenched interests, or a systemic breakdown along with an information gap, we were often frustrated by how little our reporting mattered. In the above examples, there was significant impact for individuals. But we created our impact by helping people avoid problems.

When we tried to use our reporting to address the more systemic problems directly, it felt more like alchemy. It might take a banger of a traditional investigation, partnerships, an algorithmic blessing, creativity, and luck.

I don’t think newsrooms should abandon trying to create individual utility through filling information gaps. It's the most predictable way to be useful. But I'd also like to see us increase our social utility—the likelihood of people being able to use our information productively to confront challenges that require group action.

The headwinds to creating news with social utility

All high-utility journalism faces structural hurdles, including limited reach in an attention economy dominated by profit-driven content, a need to preserve independence, and the absence of a market model that adequately values the social benefits of news.

News’ lack of social utility is an incredibly hard problem to solve for. I've almost talked myself out of wanting to try. But there are serious challenges that come with creating any service-oriented news product. High social utility products or frameworks will be no different.

Reach: High-quality news and information continue to make up only a small fraction of most people’s information diets. This kind of information is marginal to information designed to sell us things, elicit strong emotional reactions, or misinformation for commercial or political benefit. Breaking through this environment with news that leads to a clear individual benefit is hard enough. Communicating in some way that an individual benefit is also bound up with a larger group will require extra time and attention audiences are reluctant to give. 

This marginality should, however, increase our comfort with trying to deliver information to challenge the inaccurate and harmful effects of the information prioritized by social media companies. Polarization is profitable for these companies and highly desirable for both of the dominant political parties, but particularly for the current administration. Our job is to provide a counterweight to entrenched power, and increasing the social utility of news would help.

Independence: When we’re talking about things like collective action and helping people address systemic issues, there should be concern for journalistic independence. There’s no concrete framework to run up against some kind of independence stress test yet, so for now I’m anchoring to two ideas. First, transparency and disciplined communication of newsroom values offer both newsrooms and audiences a lot of protection against manipulation. Newsrooms that already practice this kind of transparency have long been able to successfully work to increase civic participation without advocating for any particular candidate, for example. 

The second idea is to be increasingly honest about how much of our editorial independence has been made possible by other systems acting on the information we provide and accountability gaps we uncover. We relied on elected officials, the legal system, regulators, educators, and service organizations to take our work and run with it, and they have been crucial to our impact. All of these systems are becoming less responsive to news, leaving communities across the county with information gaps, material challenges, and a democratic culture problem. Those of us in news can shift our role from that of middleman to catalyst, helping our audiences find ways to make these other actors more directly responsive to their communities. 

Economics: There is unlikely to be a market benefit for providing news with high social utility. Let’s go back to the example of trash collection in Philadelphia. Sanitation workers earned about $20 an hour before their strike. They make more now, but the amount still teeters on the edge of a living wage. We would seriously underestimate the social utility of sanitation work and its value to residents if we used wages as the indicator of this value. We can’t rely on the market to help us find ways to sustainably create and pay for news with social utility.

Some early inspiration for driving up social utility

We can base new social utility models in part on participatory journalism initiatives that redistribute the function of news to communities and have faith that people can work productively together to solve problems even without institutional support.

When I say early, I mean very early. But we do have a lot of work to build on to drive up our social utility. I’m outlining some of what I’ve found inside journalism that might be instructive. I admit I’m totally undereducated on policy, tax, and regulatory proposals that might be useful in driving up the social utility of news, but I'm working on getting up to speed. These ideas don't necessarily hang together, so bear with the lack of transition between them. The paragraph breaks are doing all the work here!

My ideas about social utility are in direct conversation with current discussions around the need for journalism to have a coherent theory of change and the push to make journalism a driver of civic participation and health. I support these efforts on their own. I also think moving beyond journalism's individual action and benefit frame is probably necessary to achieve more ambitious outcomes. 

Community-based newspapers and ethnic media outlets often succeeded in creating impact, and continue to do so, without the luxury of responsive systems. There are countless historical examples of outlets that created impact across the country and world by harnessing the power within their community to attend to their own needs. What were the mechanics of creating this utility? Contemporary examples built on the blueprint of ethnic media, like Capital B and Documented are also examples of using information to meet the needs of a group.

As I’ve been pushing my thinking on collective action and reporting, I’ve been mulling over this piece by Darryl Holiday making the case for democratizing the news. Please give it a read. Think about his opening reflection about collective action. How might we as reporters make everyone’s role in collective action as clear, easy, and meaningful as what Darryl witnessed on that Brazilian beach?  

Speaking of Darryl, If Outlier’s TXTOUTLIER and City Bureau’s Documenters program were both drowning and I could only save one, I truly don’t know what I would do. Both spin off tremendously high value for their communities and are flexible enough to be continuously adapted. Documenters both has and creates social utility. It’s a news and information program that helps people work together and create more healthy civic systems. It is not advocacy; it is not government; it is community-driven and community-centered. We need to work harder to develop more networks, formats, distribution methods, and initiatives that are democratic and redistribute the function and power of news directly to the community like Documenters does.

I have always been a solutions journalism skeptic, and thus far I remain so. However, there is overlap between the goals of solutions journalism and some of the ideas that might increase the social utility of news. I’ve begun a fresh dive into the methods and outcomes solutions journalism has amassed in more than a decade of work. I might have my mind changed.

What's next?

Thank you for engaging with these ideas. I’d love to know if increasing the social utility of news seems like an obvious goal. Would you want to try to increase the social utility of the information work you do? If you’re not sure, what’s stopping you? 

I am sure there are examples of news already working to create social utility that I’ve missed. If there are examples of news working to create social utility that spring to mind, please let me know. There are of course plenty of ideas from outside of news we should be learning from, too. I plan to dive into a few of them soon. Take care until next week.