Janine Jackson interviewed ID’s Alex Frandsen about Local News Day for the April 3, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: News media can be like the old joke about the weather: Everybody complains, but nobody does anything. But as we’ve seen billionaire owners turning news into yet another profit-driven enterprise—not, to be clear, entities that need to sustain themselves, but that need to generate ever-higher quarterly profits for shareholders—the truth is there has been plenty of, not just protest and criticism, but ground-level organizing to find other ways to support the work we need from journalism in the public interest.
A lot of that work is local, but it is not, on that account, isolated. One example: April 9 is Local News Day. That’s a project led by a coalition of journalists and nonprofit and media groups looking to uplift local news across the country. That effort is just one of many.
We’re joined now by Alex Frandsen from the group Free Press; he helps lead the Media Power Collaborative, an organizing space for media workers, movement organizers and researchers to work on a shared vision for the future of our local media system. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Alex Frandsen.
Alex Frandsen: Hi, Janine. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
JJ: The work of defining what communities need from news, and doing that by actually listening to people instead of talking over them, the work of engaging policymakers and addressing those needs—this is not the work of a day. This is long-term work. Still, focus points can be helpful in calling attention to these ongoing issues. And so, could I just ask you to start with the idea of something like Local News Day, and how that sort of individual event or effort can tie into the longer-term work that you do?
Alex Frandsen: “The role of truthful, community-rooted local news and civic information has never been more clear in the overall health of our democracy.”
AF: I think, in a lot of ways, this first inaugural Local News Day is coming at a really critical inflection point that communities and journalists are feeling across the country right now, which is that the role of truthful, community-rooted local news and civic information has never been more clear in the overall health of our democracy and of our communities. And I think folks are feeling the deficits on that front more acutely than ever.
And we’re not going to solve everything on Local News Day, of course. Anytime you have a news peg like this, to draw people into an issue in a concrete way, give them something to rally around, I think it’s just instrumental to building the long-term organizing and awareness we need in this field.
I think many folks in the media world have been talking about the struggles and collapse of local news, over the past two decades in particular, but what hasn’t happened quite yet is for this to become a true public-interest issue with broad public buy-in. I think that’s absolutely changing. I think events like Local News Day are one of our best avenues to ramp that up by engagement at the community level.
JJ: Absolutely. And anyone who’s engaged media knows that often journalists will say, “Well, what’s the peg? What’s happening this week that will allow me to delve into these ongoing issues?”
Last fall you wrote a piece, I saw it on Next City, and it led with a complaint from the former mayor of Greensboro, North Carolina, Nancy Vaughan. She said:
A city of Greensboro’s size and significance deserves stronger [news] coverage…. It deserves a news ecosystem that reflects its energy, complexity and future. Supporting local reporting isn’t just about newspapers—it’s about sustaining an informed, connected community.
To me, that sounds like a media critic! And it’s meaningful, I think, that public officials, who are the ones that many of us think of as making the deals to allow things to be bought up and priced out, that they are themselves among those noticing the harms of this increasingly barren news landscape. That’s meaningful, yeah?
Next City (9/17/25)
AF: Yeah, absolutely. I think it reflects a growing awareness from lawmakers that local news is way more than an industry. It’s a genuine public good that we need for the functioning of our democracy. You can’t engage with your community, hold leaders accountable or create change if you don’t have ways to understand what’s happening around you.
So when you look around at some of the most pressing challenges facing folks all across the country in this moment, accurate local news and information almost feels like the raw material, like the prerequisite thing that you need to have in your community, and to create the structural change that we know we need in this moment.
Yeah, I think it’s absolutely significant that we’re seeing, not just that mayor, but dozens and dozens of lawmakers at the state and local level across the country step up and say, “This is not just an industry crisis, it’s a public crisis, and it deserves public action.”
JJ: Let’s get into it for a second, and I know we don’t have time to do justice to it. I would point folks to MediaPowerCollab.org for an elaboration of these points, but the Media Power Collaborative that you work with has a sense of what needs to happen. And these things are always works in progress, but talk us through key elements of the agenda that you’ve landed on. Tell us about that.
AF: Yeah, absolutely. So to zoom out a little bit, to contextualize the work that we’re doing with the Media Power Collaborative, I think it ties into this broader historical reality in the United States, which is that we’ve never really treated local news like the public good that it is. For the most part, we’ve treated it like an industry, like a business.
When newspapers are pulling a lot of ad revenue, I think we could pretend that was OK, because business was booming, but even when business was booming, relatively speaking for the newspaper industry, there were countless communities that were left undercovered, underserved, even outright maligned by the media. Just like in so many other parts of our society, access and resources in local media were really and have been shaped by these deep inequities. And we know the commercial market isn’t going to fix those inequities on its own.
I think that’s where this concept of public investment and public policy change really comes in. The grounding work, of course, is that in the 20th century, there was a long organizing effort to push for public investment in our local media system, and it worked. It culminated in the creation of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which was really built on a specific premise, not just to keep the local news industry afloat, but to provide the kind of public interest coverage the market simply wasn’t providing, with this explicit focus on underserved communities, basically local media for all. But I think the reality is that system was never adequate to fully plug the gaps left behind by the market.
JJ: Absolutely.
AF: And as the local news industry has collapsed at an increasing and alarming speed over the past few decades, those gaps have turned into outright chasms, I think. Corporations, hedge funds and billionaires now own a massive proportion of our media system. They’ve hollowed out newsrooms, laid off journalists, and consistently put profits over the public interest.
So what we’ve seen then is the news information gaps, that always existed to an extent, especially with rural communities, communities of color, working-class communities, those gaps have just gotten wider. And now, with the defunding of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting at the federal level, you’re seeing this final nail on the coffin that was already pretty close to shut when it came down to our underinvestment in local news.
But even amid a really depressing federal landscape on a lot of levels, we’re seeing this incredible surge of interest at the state and local level when it comes to supporting local news. As we said earlier, we’ve got more than a dozen states who right now are exploring some sort of legislation to support local news. In parallel to that, we’ve also got this growing collection of independent publishers, community newsrooms, nonprofit newsrooms, startups and BIPOC media outlets that are increasingly stepping into the biggest gaps left behind by the collapse of the market. These folks are essentially charting out the transformed, community-rooted future for local news that hopefully takes us beyond the consolidation and hyper-commercialization that we’ve seen over the past few decades.
So we’re working with, especially post-CPB, this reality that state lawmakers are right now charting out a new future for publicly funded and public supported media in this country. Question is, will this policy change lead us into a more sustainable future for the local news fields, or are we going to be content keeping our current media system afloat as is?
I think our feeling with the Media Power Collaborative is that if we’re talking about public dollars, that comes with real public-interest priorities. And we need to ensure that policy change is centering, not just the needs of the industry, but the communities themselves that are the consumers and actors with the local-news information that general providers are creating.
So, yeah, like you mentioned, our policy agenda that we’ve sketched out and launched last year, it’s quite long. It’s broken down to five different pillars. It’s packed with all these different kind of legislative approaches that lawmakers can take.
But I think if we just sum it down, it comes down to a few core points. One: High-quality local journalism is a public good that benefits entire communities. Two: Our current media system, dominated by chains, hedge funds and broadcasters, is too often beholden to shareholders instead of community members. Three: In the shadow of corporate giants, the outlets that are closest to their communities and best equipped to meet their needs are really left to struggle over a meager pool of resources. And, finally, working-class communities, rural communities and communities of color are really feeling the news information deficit most acutely.
So with those principles at heart, I think what the policy agenda really tries to do is point lawmakers towards the values and the core questions and the concrete tools at their disposal, to not just throw a life raft in the media industry as it long existed, but really make sure policy change is pointing us towards the sustainable, equitable, community future that we so badly need for our local media system.
JJ: I’ll just, finally, underscore the word you used, which is “transformative.” We are not, as you’ve said, trying to recreate or buck up an existing system. And listeners will know that FAIR has had decades of problems with CPB, with PBS and with NPR, in terms of fulfilling what their on-paper mission was.
But this is about clarifying what communities need, and actually starting the, I think that’s what’s so different, starting the conversation from communities’ information needs, rather than from, how can we support particular news outlets. That might sound linguistic, but it’s actually hugely important to start the conversation in a different place.
AF: Absolutely. I mean, ultimately, journalists are key stakeholders in the future of our media system, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. We need to figure out a way to stop the job-loss crisis in our local media systems, to stop the hollowing out of the newsrooms, and to keep the thing from collapsing entirely.
But long term, we also need to understand that consumers and readers and community members themselves are really critical stakeholders in the health of our media system. And when we can bring them in, as not just passive bystanders to what’s happening to local media, but active participants in this movement to reinvent it, and to create something that truly serves their needs, not just the needs of folks in corporate boardrooms, or who are worried about quarterly profits, I think that’ll lead to so much more impactful policy change, and lead to much more inclusive discussions, and I think points us towards long-term sustainable, and, like you said, transformative solutions that I think this moment is really laying there for us right now.
JJ: Well, you’ve set up the ground for many future conversations. We will pause for now. We’ve been speaking with Alex Frandsen from Free Press, and from the Media Power Collaborative. You can learn more about their work, and the agenda we’ve been talking about, at MediaPowerCollab.org. Alex Frandsen, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AF: Of course. Thank you so much, Janine. Appreciate it.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.