What Local News 2036 taught us about what the local news field needs right now

A Field-Tested Process for Reimagining Public Media

In 2025, the Press Forward Public Policy Working Group asked a question that doesn't get asked often enough in local news funding circles: instead of reacting to the next funding gap or legislative deadline, what if the field stepped back and asked what it actually wants 2036 to look like?

That question became Local News 2036 (LN2036) — a collaboration between Commoner Co., Press Forward, Democracy Fund, and Dot Connector Studio to build three scenarios for the future of local news, and a facilitation toolkit to help field leaders use those scenarios to identify shared outcomes. What started as a futuring exercise evolved into a tested, repeatable process for building shared vision from the ground up — at the exact moment the field needs one most.

Three Futures, One Toolkit

Drawing on futuring and scenario planning methodology, the team developed three possible futures for local news in 2036 — Commerce Dominates, Information is Power, and Trust, Justice & a New American Way — and stress-tested them through conversations with more than 90 field leaders, in person and virtually, across the second half of 2025. The scenarios were published alongside field leader perspectives, and were shared with hundreds of attendees at the Press Forward Summit.

From there, the team built a facilitation guide that anyone in the field can use to run their own 2036 conversation. Presented at the Press Forward workshop at the 2026 Knight Media Forum, the guide struck a nerve — more than 17 Press Forward chapters expressed interest within weeks.

So far, four chapters have run sessions using the guide: Press Forward Vermont, the New Mexico Local News Fund, the Washington News Fund/Washington State News Alliance, and Press Forward Montana — reaching an estimated 175 participants across journalists, residents, civic leaders, educators, and funders.

Despite the differences in format, geography, and who was in the room, the outcomes converged. Media literacy as a core civic skill in K–12 and information equity across communities each emerged as priorities in three of the four sessions. Community connection and wellbeing, government accountability, and civic participation each surfaced in two of four. 

Press Forward's Caroline Merenda described the throughline well: Chapters are making plans regardless of the chaos in the world, and a structured way to think long-term helps them stay the course.

Why This Matters Now: Reimagining Public Media

We’re at a pivotal moment for public media in this country — one that calls for a vision of what public media should be, co-created with the communities it's meant to serve rather than handed down to them. It's also the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a moment when a lot of people are looking back at the country's founding commitments to a free and informed citizenry while asking what comes next.

LN2036 already showed that this kind of process works. Four coalitions, in four very different states of organizational maturity, used the same guide to arrive at consistent, meaningfully-held priorities: information equity, media literacy, government accountability, civic participation. It's evidence that when you give a community room to imagine a future and work backward from it, the priorities that surface are remarkably aligned, even across very different rooms.

That's exactly the process public media needs right now. Rather than a small group of institutions defining what a reimagined public media system should look like, LN2036 offers a model for building that definition collectively — chapter by chapter, community by community — so that the resulting vision is grounded in what people need from their information ecosystems, not just what funders or policymakers assume they need.

We see real potential in applying LN2036 at scale to this specific question: How might we reimagine the public media system based on what we've been seeing in communities for the last several years? 

If a broad set of chapters and communities used this process to answer that question together, the result would be something the field rarely has: a coherent, ground-up perspective on one of the most consequential funding and policy conversations of this moment.

What's Next

The guide itself needs to evolve to support this. The next version can speak more directly to where a chapter or community is in its own development — newer coalitions need different scaffolding than established ones — while preserving the open-endedness that made four very different uses possible from the same starting point in this first round.

Local News 2036 set out to test something simple: Could the local news field step out of crisis mode long enough to imagine something different, and use that shared vision to move together? Across four states and hundreds of participants, the answer was yes. The bigger test — whether that same process can help an entire field define what it wants public media to become — is just getting started.