New York Focus Statewide Community Listening Tour

As the state’s only nonprofit statewide newsroom, part of our mission is to help rebuild a local news ecosystem that has faced years of relentless cuts: Almost half of New York’s newspapers have died in the last two decades.

Why do we care? New York Focus, an independent nonprofit newsroom, investigates power in the Empire State. Founded in 2020, we publish in-depth journalism about climate, housing, criminal justice, immigration and economic development in order to explain how the state really works.

With generous support from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, we set out to answer this question. Between the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024, New York Focus traveled to cities like Rochester, Albany, Potsdam, and Syracuse to gather information from local communities and media partners to understand the local news landscape of New York.

Here are our key findings:

New Yorkers are eager for change. Residents explained that the decline of local news has left a major hole when it comes to finding basic civic information about municipal, town, village, county, and even state government. The New Yorkers we surveyed expressed a deep frustration at the lack of transparency they experience at all levels of government.
Information gaps contribute to New Yorkers’ feelings of scarcity. People expressed a deep desire to engage with the state’s political processes to address issues in their communities, but felt generally unable to access or understand those processes. In many cases, information gaps left them feeling unable to participate in their own communities and in the democratic systems of the state. They were particularly interested in more information around housing and healthcare systems.
Newsrooms want to change, too. A lack of resources often leaves newsrooms feeling unable to provide the basic level of civic information that community members request and need.

Read our full report here.