Platform monopolies have concentrated wealth and power over civic discourse at levels not seen since the first Gilded Age—and the public media system built to counter that concentration has never been adequately funded or broadly enough defined. But a new generation of civic media practitioners, relational technologists, and information stewards isn’t waiting for that system to be rescued. It’s building locally governed, human-scaled infrastructure for the information people need to participate in civic life—and in doing so, redefining what public media can be. Surviving the second Gilded Age requires recognizing and resourcing the full range of people already doing that work.

The collapse of local newspapers and the decline in the number of local journalists is associated with a variety of democratic ills, including more corruption, fewer candidates running for office, less knowledgeable voters, less participation in civic associations, and increased polarization. In addition, the vacuum left by local news has been filled by national media institutions and social media, concentrating the control of information in a few powerful hands and deepening public mistrust of the media. It will take a combination of creative public policy, philanthropic support, social entrepreneurship, and business model innovation to counter these trends. But perhaps above all else, we need a sufficient number of local reporters on the ground in communities.

Technological innovation has a dual nature: it is propelled by visionary inventors but its ultimate trajectory is shaped by human behavior, which is messy, unpredictable, and resistant to neat explanations. Information infrastructures reflect this same tension: their design alone cannot guarantee purpose or alignment with collective goals. Only by asserting authority over how priorities are defined can we ensure that information architectures serve the social infrastructures they are meant to support.

In the six years since the Our Common Purpose report was released, dramatic shifts to the information ecosystem have transformed the relationship between citizens and the media, providing serious challenges to an informed and participatory democracy. Journalism faces business model challenges aggravated by a shift away from search and toward AI, as well as governmental attacks on journalistic independence and on public media. Influential technology platforms have retreated from the difficult, controversial work of fact-checking, seeking to reduce their political exposure, while platforms like Truth Social and X are now explicitly associated with political actors. We believe even larger changes are brewing, from promising experiments in community ownership and management of social networks to the emerging idea of AI sovereignty, which may see governments around the world challenge American and Chinese companies over the ownership of powerful AI tools.