The Highway Was Never Built For Us— Neither Is The Algorithm

Much like how the US highway system destroyed so many Black neighborhoods, communities will be displaced from information systems, unless we start taking the wheel and building the roads.

‘The Information Superhighway’ according to AI.

In the 1960s, the I-95 and I-395 highways were built through Historic Overtown — known as the ‘Harlem of the South.’ The community never consented to it, never benefited from it, and has spent decades rebuilding from the damage it caused. The backdrop of that highway is present from the conference room window as I write this, and is a constant reminder for the people who live and work here every day.

A video discussing the impact of the US Highway system destroying the Historic Overtown neighborhood.

_“When we think about the future, how are we carving out a lane of the information superhighway and not just being served what the platforms tell us?”- Dr. Sahila Nelson_

This was a question that came out of the community conversations we’ve been holding across the neighborhood of Historic Overtown in Miami. Dr. Sahila Nelson, the Executive Director of Urgent Inc., is one of our 30+ community partners that manages a youth development organization focused on digital media for middle and high school students and understands the importance of local news produced by and for their community.

This problem exists beyond Black neighborhoods. The questions are, _who_ and _how_ are we building the ‘roads’ for information to be distributed and surfaced locally?

They’re questions I’m hyper focused on solving, and we should all be putting our collective efforts on how we respond and build potential solutions now. But to get there, we have to reckon with the paradoxes that continue to keep the industry stuck.

Images from Community Conversations discussing Represent Overtown — a community-led communications hub being built in Historic Overtown.

The Proximity Paradox

By a show of invisible hands, how many of you reading this right now know how to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood? If you don’t, you’re not alone.

Last month a report from the Civic Information Needs Census showed that 44% of Americans say it is difficult to get information about what’s happening in their own neighborhood— compared to just 26% who say the same about national news. That’s almost half of us that don’t even know what’s happening right around us.

“How difficult is it for you to get information about each of the following in your day to day life?” — CINC National Survey (Wave 2), Feb 2026

The fact that it is harder for people to know what’s happening in their own neighborhoods than events happening in another country should give the entire local news industry pause.

_What are we doing if not serving the people right around us with information pertinent to their neighborhoods?_

We know the content exists, because we frequently find out things after the fact. We know it’s not a talent problem, because again, this information does exist, even if on fragmented channels. We know there are communications that are not being shared widely from our 30+ organizations in this one neighborhood alone.

This is an infrastructure problem.

And it’s a problem that the industry can actually fix if we start being hyper focused on how we meaningfully put resources towards solving it.

The Fragmentation Paradox

Local news outlets have so much to contend with between doing the actual journalism, handling the distribution and running the business. We ask them to do it all, when we’re talking about most newsrooms already being understaffed.

The 2025 INN Index report showed 5.5 full time employees per member outlet on average. How do we expect a handful of employees to maintain the journalism rigor needed, plus keep up with the technology landscape while trying to keep their business going?

The industry has recognized this, as the report from Media Impact Funders, Rebuilding Local Journalism at Scale analyzed 559 proposals submitted to the Press Forward Infrastructure Open Call. In Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro’s report, she highlighted what most of us already know: the field is caught in a fragmentation paradox.

Every outlet is in need of the same operational infrastructure: CMS platforms, revenue models, distribution channels, audience data tools. Funders like Media Impact Funders, Press Forward, MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation have leaned in and funded a variety of shared efforts to accelerate growth, merge audience data platforms and expand collaborations.

But if we continue to play by the gamed rules of the platforms, we’re not funding or building towards a future where journalism will even be surfaced and distributed to the people who need it most.

The Platform Paradox

With how quickly technology has changed when it comes to the evolution of products, we’ve seen the shift from newspapers to websites to newsletters to short format video. What hasn’t changed is the need for all the content and data to be scaled into different formats and distributed across multiple platforms.

As an industry, we have not solved the underlying problem of distribution and data ownership.

Every format shift has left publishers more dependent on platforms they do not own, algorithms they do not control and audience relationships they cannot fully see. We have to start building and owning the platforms that can power local connection and local journalism.

AMP Local: Insight Into The Vision

CPM-based revenue models tied to social media performance metrics reward scale and virality, not local relevance or civic impact. We’ve been playing a game that was always rigged against local outlets and businesses.

The platforms are focused squarely on distribution and the business models that power them. Our industry needs more media + technology organizations focused on the infrastructure that will power _our_ distribution and revenue. Not just consumer apps. Not just another newsletter tool.

_We’re talking about federated infrastructure — a system where each community owns its own data and plugs into a shared network, rather than fragmenting local signal across platforms._

Local networks are not anchors at a desk. We should be thinking of local networks as nodes of a neighborhood.

We need to be actively building this shared data infrastructure — neighborhood by neighborhood — that can power distribution and unlock new revenue models to sustain the journalism.

The capture and storing of all this content and data can be used to power content across websites, newsletters, streaming channels, voice and search products that exist now and into the future.

We should be architecting to have each local outlet and each ‘ _node_’ within a neighborhood plug into the network, while having them maintain full ownership of their content and data.

That content and data can be plugged into a system of location-based search & discovery products and tools that enables an entity to publish across multiple platforms without having to build out their own technology for the newest ‘ product du jour.’ Establishing this infrastructure also enables us to reach people with local news and information that is most relevant and consequential to them.

The Ownership Paradox

This slide makes an appearance in most of my presentations. See the full keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvjdTj7_2NM

“Social media, right now, is not working well forus as citizens in a democracy. _The failure we are dealing with is a failure of imagination._ What if we were actually building tools alongside the communities which we all individually work with and serve?”

This quote from Ethan Zuckerman at the Knight Media Forum in 2020 has lived rent free in my mind since I heard it. It should be our rallying cry as an industry.

There has never been a better moment or need to build. Technology is more accessible than ever, and communities are ready and wanting connection. The only thing standing between where we are and where we need to be is the collective will and vision to seize this opportunity in time.

When we think about infrastructure at AMP Local, we’re not just thinking about a widget of content (an article, video, podcast), a website or an app. We’re thinking about how do we connect people to what’s happening right around them.

We’re focused on every aspect of a neighborhood and all the local signal that is being lost, all because we haven’t built the roads for it to flow. And we need to be building the roads NOW alongside the communities we claim to serve.

TL;DR — If I can leave you with this…

We need to stop ceding to what a handful of big tech companies think the future will look like and build the future alongside the communities we serve. The future could look like neighborhoods participating in their own networks. Neighborhoods being powered by public good infrastructure that distributes and surfaces local news and information within the ‘ information superhighway.’

“We should be able to reach every single person who lives and works here. That’s what we should aspire to build.” — soundbite from a community conversation in Overtown

Think of it as a neighborhood operating system — where every verified business, organization, publisher or person has a canonical profile that can publish, communicate, transact, and be discovered across any device through various products and channels.

Where everyday local communication is captured and distributed. Local publishers are plugged in and supported with amplification, distribution, technology and revenue sharing to fund journalism.

A neighborhood operating system should be a focus of public media infrastructure, alongside technology that supports the business operations of journalism.

If you want to know how we could potentially go about building this, I’ll be sharing more on an approach to a federated neighborhood architecture and how we’re working alongside Overtown stakeholders and two local news outlets connecting our first ‘neighborhood node.’

And if you want to know how we can potentially pay for this, I’ve written articles discussing ways we can do that, as well as through what I’m calling a ‘ Chamber of Impact’ to tap into the $140 billion market cap of business associations. I’ll share more on this and the service revenue opportunities within a community-led local network, as we learn more about the gaps and needs many businesses and organizations are having on the ground.

Bottom line, it starts with believing that we actually can build this type of pubic good infrastructure and pouring collective efforts into making sure it happens.

If you’re building public media infrastructure or experimenting on potential solutions, please be in touch . This work is too big and critical for us to be tackling in a silo. We need to have a coalition of folks who are actively experimenting _with_ communities and finding ways to join forces to solve this pressing issue. I welcome the opportunity to connect and work alongside you.