Commissioning a Local News Ecosystem Assessment: An Operational Toolkit

Cartoon of workers around a table with a laptop and printouts.

As local philanthropy becomes a more essential revenue source for local news, news ecosystem assessments are becoming an essential tool for funders, civic leaders, and newsroom leaders. These assessments reveal who is informing communities, where gaps persist, and how resources can be deployed more strategically.

If you’re like many people embarking on this work for the first time, you know you need this research, but you’re unsure exactly what it is, how it happens, and what the best practices are.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) and the Local News Impact Consortium (LNIC) built “Commissioning a Local News Ecosystem Assessment: An Operational Toolkit” to answer those questions. This toolkit is authored by Ariel Zirulnick, an independent local news strategist who worked closely with researchers, newsrooms, and funders over the last year.

The guide takes ecosystem assessment commissioners through each decision they’ll have to make, from who gets to define the goals of the research to how to present the assessment findings to the community when it’s completed. In between it tackles everything from cost estimates to how many people you need to hear from in a community needs survey.

It’s not a guide to research methods. It’s an operational playbook that fills in the steps no one ever writes down — drawn from real projects, real questions, and patterns we’ve seen across the field. (You can read more about how we learned what those steps are here.)

The toolkit also curates essential resources from organizations such as Press Forward, Impact Architects, Listening Post Collective, and Civic News Company.