Our starting point: Let’s agree that journalism is not content. It’s not a product. It’s not an export. It’s a shared resource. Treat it that way and everything changes.

The idea of a journalism commons is not new (certainly not to Nieman Lab predictions), nor is it a metaphor; it’s a tried-and-trusted, locally owned governance model that anyone can take part in, that anyone can deploy. Political economist Elinor Ostrom showed that communities can sustainably manage shared resources from forests and fisheries to energy and water, when they establish clear boundaries, collective rule-making, transparent monitoring, and local accountability.

So why not information?

In 2026, expect journalism to break decisively from its industrial complex and begin operating as a civic commons with the most durable and inventive models emerging from the Global Majority (yes, the same regions that pioneered mobile money, WhatsApp-as-infrastructure, and civic tech long before the West caught up).

Journalism fits the commons frame almost too well. Information, skills, trust, and infrastructure are all common-pool resources: vulnerable to over-use, under-investment, or capture if left ungoverned. A commons approach asks not what content we should produce, but how we can steward information resources so they regenerate and serve the public over time.

2026 won’t simply repeat commons theory, however. Journalism’s underlying materials, incentives, and infrastructures are transforming so completely that the old rules no longer apply. The rise of AI, creators, and platform capture will force something more structural: the move from a conceptual commons to an actual commons — an operating system for public knowledge, one built on shared power and shared technology, as a matter of survival.

In practice, that means we will see three things.

First, media organizations will start to develop real community governance structures: newsroom-hosted public councils with decision-making authority, coverage protocols (perhaps mirroring the Community Benefits Agreements we see in the housing space); and deepened, federated, people-powered investigations that pool trust and data across ZIP codes. Governance will move beyond symbolic listening circles into social contracts.

Second, we’ll see the proper emergence of shared civic infrastructure for journalism, a new way of running the information systems communities rely on. That includes community-owned data trusts, LLMs for public good (with the Swiss perhaps leading the way), shared financial backbones (probably underwritten by philanthropy), and federated publishing tools and protocols (like ATProto) designed for collaboration rather than competition. Data will become a public good, stewarded by journalists for a lifetime, not just a journalism awards season.

Third, legitimacy will shift. Given the phase shift that journalism (and all knowledge work) is about to experience, it simply has to. AI-native desks can summarize community briefings overnight, dark forest networks are able to syndicate secretly between peers, and cooperatively funded beats can, in theory, bypass legacy power structures. The emerging agentic web is already allowing small collectives and civic technologists to wield tools once reserved for corporations. The effect is exhilarating, decentralized, and horizon-expanding.

But it creates a new question: Who, or what, is legitimate now?

In 2026, we’ll see the first attempts to answer that by building a commons-led legitimacy layer not just for journalists, but for the systems that mediate public knowledge.

Expect the beginnings of a shared accreditation for both creators and the algorithms they rely on: visible signals for transparent governance, community oversight, open data practices, and safety by design. Recommender systems, summarization models, and civic LLMs will need to meet the same standards of accountability as the people using them.

This won’t sit alongside the creator ecosystem; it will rise from within it. Creators, collectives, and information stewards will help define which systems are safe, which models are trustworthy, and which tools serve the public. And in many places, they will be recognized as more legitimate civic actors than the institutions that preceded them.

These changes won’t replace the Old Ways overnight, but they will outflank them. They will set new expectations and make the extractive and opaque models journalism relied upon for decades increasingly indefensible.

That’s because these experiments operate on principles the old system simply cannot match. They’re feminist in practice, reciprocal rather than extractive, and care-aware rather than transactional. They move governance from distant institutions to the people most affected, and they create cooperative networks where knowledge, technology, and legitimacy circulate laterally.

Once communities experience journalism built this way, the previous model looks not just outdated but actively harmful. The commons doesn’t win because it’s fashionable; it wins because it is more human, more resilient, and more aligned with how people actually want to live together.

We are at a point of no return for public-interest media. Survival depends on shedding the posture of information manufacturing and taking up the work of stewarding civic resources, on journalists acting as the conveners, connectors, and catalysts of collective action.

Journalism must become a mirror to the society it wants to nurture. The commons isn’t vibes; it is the underlying value system that lets a society cohere.

The stakes stretch far beyond media. Publics are fragmenting. Autocracy is learning. Facts, truth, and trust no longer regenerate on their own. If journalism is to endure, it must be designed and governed as a commons, both in principle and in practice.