With Christmas near and a New Year beckoning, we at the NC Local News Workshop celebrate the many ways local journalists and media helped people in our state understand and navigate unprecedented challenges in 2020.
In the year of COVID-19, we’ve seen North Carolina residents actively involved in local democracy in countless ways, including high levels of election participation, protests, community responses to the pandemic, and initiatives to address racial inequity.
Our local journalists and media organizations have worked ceaselessly, and often in creative and inventive ways, to inform their communities, even as they faced their own hardships, financial challenges, and family stresses.
That’s why we’re gathering people together on Jan. 13 from 8:30 am-1 pm for the first NC Local News Summit, hosted by the Workshop with support from the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media at UNC. It’s a chance to make connections, learn what people are doing, and brainstorm together to solve problems or advance opportunities.
Local news needs community, just as communities need local news.
The NC Local News Workshop was established to help strengthen support systems for local news and to expand that base of mutual support between communities and the people who work to provide independent, fact-based information to inform them.
North Carolina has lost hundreds of front-line journalism jobs over the past decade, and also has welcomed new voices, new media outlets, and innovators across media and in related institutions who are trying out new ways to inform people on local public affairs topics.
We want to help connect the broad community of support for local news, and have invited journalists and news leaders, journalism educators, organizations that support journalism and civic information in different ways, foundations that fund news and information, journalism researchers, and others.
We’d love to see you there.
Learn more and find program updates via our event page, and register here.
Meantime, Happy Holidays.
