Link: Chicago Public Media launching community website, by Amy Yee at the Chicago Sun-Times

In an increasingly AI-dominated information landscape, real trusted communities and relationships will be the way to build trust and loyalty — I’m convinced of it, and organizations like New_ Public agree. So it was exciting to see Chicago Public Media take a huge step towards building a community platform.

The site will include Chicago-area information, civic and cultural resources, community-sourced knowledge and opportunities for audience participation, the nonprofit said Wednesday. It will also curate headlines from the Sun-Times, WBEZ and other news sources.

This will be a familiar argument to regular readers:

For independent journalism to “truly service the public … we should have digital infrastructure that is also steered by public media companies,” Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell said. The news industry “has ceded a lot of distribution to places like Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, and I think that has done a disservice to centering civic discourse in a healthy way.”

We’ve seen other platforms release similar efforts effectively. The Newsmast Foundation builds community-first social media apps on open protocols for newsrooms that include The Bristol Cable and Find Out Media. Flipboard’s Surf platform powers curated social feeds, again built on open social web protocols, for the likes of 404 Media and Rolling Stone (as well as my own curated non-profit US news feed). And Canada’s Village Media serves 13 local social networks through its SPACES platform.

But this is the first time we’ve seen a single social platform rolled out by a public media company at this scale. Chicago Public Media was gifted the underlying chicago.com domain and will be rolling it out to neighborhoods and suburbs throughout the area. It sounds like each community will be highlighted (perhaps with its own feed), with an attached hub that covers the entire region.

Clearly, this is an experiment, but I’m delighted to see a public media innovator explore these ideas at this scale. I see it as vindication for the idea that building stronger community applications into the public media model is a path towards a more trusted future for local journalism. I’ll be watching very closely, and I’m curious to see who dives in next.