Local/regional media can’t be just about “news.” My prediction…my hope…my challenge to the industry…is that media organizations will spend time in 2026 considering how they perpetually challenge themselves to ensure that place is at the center of their work.

How place was centered in my experience of local media growing up

When I was a kid growing up in a rural Kentucky county, local media played a major role in helping shape my sense of my community, my region, and my state — and not primarily through their news coverage.

For instance, our local newspapers shared the stories of the local drivers who were competing at the dirt racetrack in my hometown of 400 people, with pictures of each week’s winners. In the newspaper’s pages each week, I’d learn the stories of the people who populated our rural county — what they were doing, what they were building, and where they were traveling.

And then there was the section of the paper with dispatches from the many small towns across the county. These were called society columns, mostly written by community matriarchs in each of these counties. My mammaw, Beulah Hillard, curated the McHenry News for decades, a role I took over for her through middle and high school, in my first taste of journalism. (You can find more about these society columns at Columbia Journalism Review.) This documentation of the lives lived in these towns were as important as the accountability journalism, which is why I’m intrigued by Derek Willis’ 2026 predictions about the continued value of those local news archives.

At the onset of the 2000s, I worked my way through college reporting for area weekly newspapers. In the process, I saw firsthand the strain digital disruption was causing on those traditional business models, a disruption that swayed me from my original career plan to pursue life as a reporter with a steady paycheck writing about communities for a living.

In the digital era, we’ve too often distanced ourselves from our connection to place

A quarter-century later, we see the continued major strain on the business model of traditional local news outlets — more consolidation, more belt tightening, and not enough ground gained in diversified business models. We have seen major disruptions to the traditional business model of regional public media outlets as well, with the defunding of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. Meanwhile, profit continues to favor opinion media, with a focus on national politics, national identities, and national culture wars — while a lot of local news outlets are filled with clickbait political headlines and stories from far away being deceptively presented as potentially local.

Yet, people live their lives in a particular place. And there is a great degree of natural talent for storytelling and information curation in those places. Those creators may be contributing via online community forums, accounts on web platforms, or by whatever other media may be necessary to share their stories and information.

It’s crucial that news organizations think about how we tap into local talent to make placemaking a community-wide endeavor and to get — and keep — people civically engaged with their place, and one another. That requires broadening the remit of journalism’s focus beyond just news and information. It requires thinking about how the stories we share connect people with, and within, their places.

Journalism organizations cannot do this on their own. It will be accomplished with the newsroom acting as one stakeholder in a co-creative network. Thus, part of this work is embracing creators and connectors from a diverse array of positions — what Garry Pierre-Pierre writes about as “informal community information networks” in his prediction this year and what Dale R. Anglin writes about as the “abundance of people in communities who are dedicated to keeping people informed and engaged” in his.

And it’s also crucial that this work be imbued with a strong sense of “civic imagination” — connecting people to think about real-world “story worlds” — the pasts, present state, and potential futures of places. There is a strong role for traditional media outlets to play in this work, but it will — and should — happen alongside others who are invested in those communities as well.

Let me share the stories of two collaborators here in Kentucky I’ve been working with that illustrate this ability to find creative ways to connect people to place.

A newspaper from the future

This year, our company — InnoEngine — ran what is now being called the largest town hall in U.S. history on behalf of Google’s Jigsaw team. (More via PBS NewsHour.) Residents of Warren County, Kentucky (home to the state’s third-largest city, Bowling Green) were invited to think about what they wanted to see happen as their county is projected to grow by another City of Bowling Green in 25 years or less. The information is helping inform a “BG 2050” civic imagination project we are leading for the Warren County government through the work of more than 100 community leaders, active citizens, and storytellers from the region.

As part of a What Could BG Be? campaign inviting residents of the region to weigh in on what they want for their town’s future, Bowling Green Daily News publisher Joe Imel conceived of a bold move — to release a 12-page edition of the newspaper on President’s Day 2025 (when the newspaper wasn’t running a regular print edition) from Feb. 17, 2050.

A large set of volunteer paper delivery drivers met up well before the sun had come up to drive to neighborhoods throughout the county to throw newspapers door to door. The newspaper’s racks at stores featured 2050 editions. Copies were dropped at coffee shops, diners, and other gathering places. There were even old-school young folks with sandwich boards handing out copies of the paper downtown and at key intersections.

Each staff reporter of the Daily News — including Imel — penned a story set in a potential future of Bowling Green. A partnership with the Bowling Green High School newspaper, the Purple Gem, led to six articles about the future authored by high school reporters-in-training. And several creative writers from the region — including a speculative fiction novelist, a folklorist, a creative writing Master’s student at WKU, and a theater teacher at an area middle school — contributed pieces as well.

Some were taken aback that the newspaper of record would release a piece of fiction. But Imel saw the newspaper play a new type of role in getting a conversation going about what could happen in the community over the next 25 years, and how people think about their town and the growth it is going through. You can find all the stories available online.

Media representations of place: A call to content creators

Here’s another example that doesn’t involve a traditional news outlet at all (at least not yet). InnoEngine is currently working with Shawn Rubel, the founder of Vecteezy, to design a 2026 initiative to collect diverse representations of Kentucky through visual media.

Shawn moved to Kentucky from Canada around 20 years ago to work as a designer for a couple of businesses in the state. In the process, Shawn fell in love with Kentucky. He started a side hustle that has grown into one of the leading two-sided digital marketplaces for visual content, where creators share their visual media creations while those seeking designs, photos, and videos can download them.

Shawn (just named one of the inaugural members of the Regional Technology Hall of Fame) bootstrapped this company by scaling his business out of an adaptively reused former shopping mall turned “innovation campus” for entrepreneurs in Bowling Green called the WKU Innovation Campus. In the process, he got to know a wide range of entrepreneurs, tech talent, and content creators in the region, through the programs of the Central Region Ecosystem for Arts, Technology, & Entrepreneurship (or CREATE) which operates out of the WKU Innovation Campus.

As Shawn thought about the creative talent and the stories of the state he now calls home — vis-à-vis how that state is often understood and represented — he realized that his Vecteezy platform could provide a content repository for visual representations of Kentucky.

Vecteezy is now exploring an initiative to build a library of content representing Kentucky by reaching out to creators in the new Narrative Network started by CREATE to connect content creators in the region, as well as seeking working relationships alongside projects/nonprofits like The Appalachian Retelling Project, Kentucky to the World, and the University of Southern California’s Civic Imagination Incubator for storytellers in and around Kentucky.

In this case, a tech platform will be enabling creators to bring their place-based content together into a central repository that can be used for creators in that place, representations of that place, and for uses in education and elsewhere.

The importance of placemaking and civic imagination

People’s connections to the places we all live, work, and spend time play a key role in our civic engagement. In order for journalism to be relevant, it must be just one part of all the stories that connect us to our places and to one another. That will come through embracing the participants in local information networks, through embracing the work of content creators throughout our regions, and through embracing a wider role of elevating place-based stories (including fiction).

Let’s have 2026 be the year that more local/regional media outlets embrace placemaking as a key goal, broaden the remit of their organizations to achieve it, and embrace their community of co-creators necessary to make it happen.

Sam Ford is a founding partner with InnoEngine.