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The New Media Landscape for Government Communicators

The New Media Landscape for Government Communicators
$69USD

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About this course

An advanced, self-paced course on finding out where your residents actually get local information, and building a communications strategy around the evidence rather than habit.

The local information landscape your community relies on isn't the one most communications plans were written for. Newspaper newsrooms have lost more than half their staff since 2008 and closures continue. More than half of US adults now get local news from online forums such as Facebook groups and Nextdoor. Neighborhood moderators, local creators, faith leaders and group chats now shape what many residents believe about their local government, often before your announcement reaches them.

This course is about understanding that environment as it really is in your community, and working within it. You'll map every channel residents use, from the remaining local press to the informal spaces you can't see into, by asking the people who can see how information moves. You'll assess what's left of the formal media and how to work with it honestly, decide when to take part in informal online spaces and when simply to listen, and find the trusted voices who carry weight with different parts of your community, including the legal and ethical lines around disclosure, public records, the First Amendment and language access as they stand in 2026.

The last two lessons turn all of that into strategy: a gap analysis, a one-page strategic brief and a way of measuring whether you're closing the gaps rather than just growing reach. Every lesson is built on verified, linked sources and real cases, and ends with a practical exercise for your own organization.

You'll do the work in the Information Environment Mapping Workbook, which brings together an information environment map, a community media landscape assessment and an influencer and intermediary audit, and ends with a one-page summary for leadership. The Community Member Persona Workbook and the Communications Audit Workbook are also included.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government communicators who suspect their channel mix reflects how things used to work rather than how residents get information now
  • Communications leads who need to make an evidence-based case to leadership for changing where time and budget go
  • Solo communicators who can't be everywhere and need to know where their effort will actually reach people
  • Anyone responsible for public information in a community where the local press has thinned out

Read a sample from this course

The map in your head is out of date

A water main breaks on a Tuesday morning and a boil-water notice goes out by nine. You send the media release to the usual list, post it on Facebook and X, and push it to the website. By lunchtime the front desk is taking calls from residents who haven't heard anything, and a neighborhood Facebook group with more members than the local paper has subscribers is arguing about whether the notice covers their street. Nobody there has linked to your post. Somebody has posted a screenshot of a text from a cousin who works for the utility.

Every communications strategy rests on assumptions about how the community gets its information: which outlets people read, which platforms they use, whose word they trust. Most of those assumptions have never been tested. They were inherited from how things worked a decade ago and filtered through the experience of people who work in government, who are rarely a representative slice of the community they serve.

National research shows how far things have moved. Pew Research Center found in 2024 that the share of Americans who follow local news very closely fell from 37% in 2016 to 22%, and that television's share as the preferred source of local news fell from 41% in 2018 to 32%. Most striking, 52% of US adults now get local news from online forums such as Facebook groups or Nextdoor, up 14 points since 2018. (Pew Research Center, 2024) Meanwhile Northwestern's Medill Local News Initiative counted 213 counties with no local news source at all in 2025, and 1,524 with only one. (Medill, 2025)

That gives you the outline: a thinner professional press, and more local information moving through spaces nobody edits. What national data can't tell you is which of those patterns applies in your community, neighborhood by neighborhood, language by language. The map has to be yours, built from local evidence. This lesson is about how to build it.

Keep reading — this course continues with 5 more lessons and 47 more sections.

What you'll learn

Map your community's actual information environment across formal media, public social media, community organizations, informal channels and your own channels.
Run key informant interviews and a light listening routine that reveal how information really moves, without crossing into surveillance.
Assess each local outlet as it is now, including ownership, staffing, coverage and reach, and adjust your media relations accordingly.
Decide when to take part in neighborhood groups and forums and when to listen, and build working relationships with the people who moderate them.
Apply the current legal position on official social media, public records, covert sponsorship and language access to your informal channel and partnership work.
Identify and audit the trusted voices and intermediaries in your community, and work with them as independent partners rather than a distribution list.
6 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.The map in your head is out of date
  2. 2.Mapping five kinds of channel
  3. 3.Asking the people who can see how information moves
  4. 4.Listening in public, and staying on the right side of the line
  5. 5.Following a message down the chain
  6. 6.Try this: a first map in two weeks
  7. 7.You're one voice among many, and that's the starting point
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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