Sarah Alvarez has spent much of her career rethinking how local journalism can serve the public. After working as a civil rights attorney, then as a reporter and producer at the NPR station Michigan Public, she founded Outlier Media in 2016. Alvarez said the Detroit-based nonprofit newsroom was designed to fill information and accountability gaps in communities that were often overlooked by traditional news organizations.. One of its signature innovations, TXT OUTLIER, is a text message service Alvarez created to connect Detroiters directly with journalists and provide practical information on issues affecting their lives, from utility bills to housing and foreclosures.
Under Alvarez’s leadership, Outlier also expanded its Documenters program, an initiative that trains and pays residents to attend and report on public meetings to create a public record of local government decisions in places that don’t have press coverage. The initiative has engaged more than 700 Detroiters and since spread nationwide, creating new opportunities for civic participation and public accountability. Alvarez, who is now the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University in Philadelphia, is working to replicate these types of programs in more newsrooms and communities beyond Detroit.
She spoke with the 2027 class of Nieman Fellows about building journalism around community information needs, using technology to make local news more useful, and creating mechanisms for feedback and input from the people they serve.
Edited excerpts:
I went to work in public radio, and I did not understand that the business model of public radio is really focused on members, [who] are well-resourced members of the public. I was doing a lot of reporting on low-income families for people who had money, and I did not want to do that. At that time, public media was unwilling to have a broader vision of the public. They didn’t actually want to serve people with high information needs.
What we were really missing was an information-needs framework. What would it mean for a news organization to try to identify the information and accountability gaps in a community and fill them? [To] be focused on need rather than the business model. Even public radio and public media can be very capital-focused. That’s what I really wanted to do.
When I say civic media, what I mean by that is work that is need-based, very community-defined and driven, and very much focused on building capacity in an audience, not just finding a consumer of information.
I really look at it as a service, and I also want it to provide some kind of informational utility. I want it to be designed to be used.
A good example of this also comes from Detroit. Nina Ignaczak, who runs Planet Detroit, has come up with a civic media toolkit that is a data project that pulls information from a bunch of different things, like legislative activity on [an] issue, what groups are doing to work on it, when the next meeting about this is. That’s a good example of something that you could do that isn’t storytelling at all. It’s an appendage to a story that helps people act on [different issues] if that’s what they would like to do.
Even structuring your information — like the text message system — so it’s designed for you to use it in the real world. Whereas a story doesn’t design information for you to use in the real world that often. Often, as journalists, we lead people. We get people very excited. We lead them to [a] place, and then we drop them off a cliff in terms of what they should do next. The civic media [outlets], we’re going to keep going with you. It’s not advocacy. And not all work can be structured that way. But it’s a specific part of journalism, and the part I’m most interested in.
We deal with information all the time, and yet we’re not that curious about its mechanisms. For example, why are we still doing stories? What is the mechanism by which we believe stories work? What is the power of a narrative? What is the power of the information? How do we break these different components up? What would you do if you are reading a story and then you want to do something? What’s the best way to help somebody do that?
Is the person in this story going to get anything from it at the end? Who is benefiting from telling that story? Is there a different way to do that rather than just by using somebody’s story who is vulnerable? Is there a better way to address that problem rather than just a narrative?
It’s not that I don’t believe that narratives have power, but I don’t necessarily want to see a case where there’s a benefit for other people at the expense of the people who are living it right now.
I’m interested in those kinds of mechanics. This isn’t something that we talk about that much in journalism. It’s not necessarily because we don’t care enough. We don’t really have a lot of information about how and why the information works this way.
If we think about news not in a product way, but a functional way, what are we actually trying to do? What are the essential functions of news?
The essential functions that I see are responding to information gaps, responding to community needs, and record creation. If you published a bunch of work and the need didn’t go away, then you should think creatively about other ways that you can still ethically meet that need.
We also don’t have a definition of what it means to do journalism in the public interest. We are trying to do some work on that, so that we can at least understand if [our work] is advocacy or if it’s just in the public interest.
It’s almost like a lot of the work that’s gone on around immigration in the country very recently, where you could say that it’s advocacy or community work to do ICE-watch type of work, right? If we can define that better, then we can probably have news frameworks that actually meet needs better.
There is no business model for journalism. Let’s start there. If you’re trying to do service work, your work is going to need to be subsidized somewhere. It’s always been subsidized in this country.
I just think there are two reasons why I really always resist the business conversation. One reason is I think it’s a distraction. We have this problem of how do we support media? That’s a big question. But the grooves in that conversation are so well worn. I don’t think it’s that productive.
The other reason is that we also have a product and a value problem. That’s what I want to talk about more. The business conversation conflates all of those things because it’s like, “The value is what the value is, and whether we can support it or not, and how we support it is a different conversation.”
I think a lot of us in the nonprofit and service journalism space get called into this conversation: “How are you going to fix the business model?” And I say, “Why don’t you fix the business model? I’m busy.” We have a lot to do, and we can’t do everything. I do think it’s this way of undermining our work by trying to put too much on our plate, because it’s not doable. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important, but I think it’s a trap, and I certainly don’t have time to spend on it.
Honestly, the two issues that I would really like to report on — because I feel like I need to figure this out — are immigration and climate. I don’t actually think that we have good frameworks [for these beats], because these are crises in some places. When there is a crisis, we know how to report on that. We have the tools. But when it is a threat and it’s real, but it’s not immediate, we do not have good methods of translating that and helping people get active or adjust to the threat. So we either do too little or too much, scare … them, and they feel paralyzed, or act like it’s somebody else’s problem, and they feel like they don’t have to do anything.
So I do think the middle ground of this is coming. And I wonder about the health context. A lot of the information we have about our own health is in that space — this is not going to be good for you; it’s not a problem for you right now. [For example], smoking. It’s not going to kill you as soon as you smoke a cigarette, but it’s not good for you. What are the kinds of informational tactics that those folks have used to try to rightsize risk and action? In that health context, it’s mostly individual, and that is something that we need to get past in the environmental framework. We have to get collective. Climate and immigration are big issues. These are things that we don’t really know how to be effective around as information providers. And I really would love for us to figure it out.
