This month’s Civic Voice, The Civic Circle’s newsletter, looks at the collapse of the local news industry, and the many attempts to revive it. Local newspapers not only need short-term federal relief, as I write in The Fulcrum, but a new business model and mission. Even as the covid-19 pandemic decimates newsrooms around the country, the crisis has energized a “civic news” movement that sets out to reinvent newspapers as more community and public service minded. Read the whole story here.
May’s Civic Voice also examines the nature of faith in democracy, noting that the word faith “more often than not connotes religious belief. But faith is also an essential ingredient for democracy, whether citizens engage in spiritual worship or not.” Nihilism has come into vogue lately on both the left and the right, but “nihilism threatens democracy as surely as any autocrat. These are challenging times, to be sure. But they call for action, and the faith to take it, not cynical paralysis.”
Also in this month’s newsletter: Stories about elementary schoolers churning out their own newspapers from home during the pandemic, the coming youth voter “earthquake,” and and update on The Civic Circle’s GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which generated more than $1,000 each for No Kid Hungry Maryland, and The Civic Circle’s new educational video program. Read the whole newsletter here.