Author: Darryl Holliday
Published by: Columbia Journalism Review
Link: Read the article
This article argues that journalism should be understood and designed as public infrastructure—akin to water systems, schools, or roads. Darryl Holliday, journalist and co-founder of City Bureau in Chicago, calls for a paradigm shift: from journalism as a product to journalism as a civic system of care and power-sharing.
He explores how traditional media systems, rooted in extractive models of “speaking for” communities, have often failed to serve those most impacted by injustice. In contrast, new models like City Bureau’s Documenters program are building public participation into the fabric of journalism itself—training residents to attend and record public meetings, co-producing stories, and redistributing power and visibility.
Key arguments:
- Journalism must move beyond crisis framing to long-term, care-centered systems change.
- The field should be measured not by clicks but by public utility and civic trust.
- Newsrooms must be reimagined not just through DEI language but by fundamentally restructuring who holds knowledge and who gets heard.
- There’s a need to “build a media system that treats people like they matter.”
💡 Where It Matters in Your Work
- Newsletter Essay (paired with Nancy Folbre): This article is the perfect civic counterpart to Folbre’s work on caregiving. Where Folbre speaks to the undervalued infrastructure of the home, Holliday speaks to the undervalued infrastructure of public discourse. A newsletter essay could braid them under the theme: “Invisible Systems: What Happens When Our Most Vital Infrastructure Is Intimate, Public, and Ignored?”
- Library Entry – Companion Machines / Civic Heart module: File it under your Civic Preparation or Civic Heart modules as a foundational text on media-as-care. It supports your long-term work reimagining journalism as a relational, infrastructural system, not a performance or profession.
- Book – This Time Could We Be Ready: This fits in a chapter that explores the tools we need for shared civic readiness—especially those that restore power to communities and foster distributed stewardship. If you have a chapter on information as civic soil, this belongs there.