Jorge Heredia can be hard to find in the maze of rooms and activities going on at the Garcia Center for the Arts in San Bernardino, California. He could be in the pottery studio, or the library, or putting up a new exhibit in the beautiful old adobe and brick spaces that served as a fire station a century ago. 

When I spoke with him, he was outside in a side lot where he’s been building a community garden. Canvases adorned with local artists’ work sit among banana trees and kale, part of an exhibit Heredia commissioned and created to reflect information via art around a difficult local topic: Environmental justice.

He mentioned the area’s proliferation of Amazon logistics centers and its air quality, among the worst in the country. One photograph shows a couple looking out from their back garden to a horizon blocked by a massive warehouse. Another piece imagines a PR campaign for San Bernardino with the tagline, “Where the Air is Rare!” 

The garden exhibit might not fit a traditional news format, but Heredia says the goal is the same — to “continue the ongoing conversation around environmental justice.”

The Garcia Center for the Arts is in California’s Inland Empire (IE), a region of around 4 million people in Southern California hosting literal deserts, encompassing areas like Death Valley and Joshua Tree. Both of the area’s legacy newspapers are owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital and have seen staff numbers gutted. Nearby L.A. media largely cover the region for crime, meaning the IE could easily be considered a news desert, too. 

But in taking a closer look, it’s clear that the area can’t be defined by this growing buzzword. Instead, the IE is what we at the Listening Post Collective (LPC) like to call an information garden, a community where everyone has equitable access to high-quality, culturally-relevant, civic information, in relevant languages on the local issues they care about. And it needs a bit of watering. 

The reality is there’s a vibrant community of media-makers in the IE: the Garcia Center for the Arts and other organizations, independent journalists, digital media, public media, and even local citizens who have taken it upon themselves to get and share sourced civic information. 

This majority Latino region hosts a population that has rarely been reflected in the local reporting corps, so many young media-makers are exploring their craft on social media where they don’t face the barriers to get involved that legacy media often put up. 

In 2020, the LPC was invited to bring our Civic Media Design process to the Inland Empire. It’s a multi-year investment that includes three phases: Listen, Seed, and Cultivate. As part of the initial year-long Listen phase, we worked with local IE researchers to map the information ecosystem, talking in-depth with a wide swath of people, from a former Riverside mayor, to a local community college journalism professor, to a resident documenting city council meetings on Instagram, to Heredia at the Garcia Center for the Arts. 

The goal was to better understand how civic information was moving in the area, what kinds of support was needed to make sure people got the news they needed, and how to create a more equitable news ecosystem. 

Ultimately, we produced a comprehensive community facing document called an information ecosystem assessment (IEA), something we, along with our parent organization Internews, have been pioneering around the world for more than 40 years. We surveyed a few hundred local residents as part of our work, and collectively, they helped us craft a list of recommendations, which fed into phase two of our process, where we seed funded community solutions to local information gaps. 

Making this kind of community data open-source is key to the process because it acknowledges that it ultimately belongs to the community, and that what comes next isn’t just the proprietary space of the “experts,” organizations like mine, to determine what’s best. To be sustainable, these information solutions need to come from the community and its members themselves. 

After circulating our IEA, we set up a request for community proposals, and received around 12 ideas for solving some of the issues documented in the assessment. As part of our Seed phase, we funded three ideas, including helping two new civic media projects grow their work, audience and impact. In addition to funding, the Frontline Observer and The Space have also received wrap-around services from our team, including advice on whether they wanted to be LLCs with fiscal sponsors, non-profits, grant writing, editorial structure, and more. 

Longtime IE reporter Anthony Victoria said he wanted to launch the Frontline Observer in part to, “create a strong media ecosystem that uplifts important local news stories about local people and local issues by local journalists.” 

He also knows from experience that there’s a real gap in guidance for younger mediamakers trying to stay local while building a career. 

“I want my outlet to provide aspiring local journalists a place to grow, and give them strong editorial support as they explore their reporting,” Victoria added. 

For the past year and a half, we’ve been busy in phase three, cultivating what we planted with IE collaborators like Anthony, and we’re seeing a garden continue to bloom. A community media literacy course launched as part of the IEA recommendations is being absorbed by a local community college, Anthony Victoria is now a California Local News Fellow partnered with local public media, and institutions around the Inland Empire are using the IEA document to help guide investments and build civic media infrastructure. 

News deserts are real, and a real issue, but it’s also important to remember that not having a healthy legacy media outlet or a local newspaper doesn’t mean information isn’t still getting shared. The term can also feel like yet another stigma to communities that have been historically left out of the formal news ecosystem by no fault of their own. 

Listening to a community and looking for existing news gardens takes time, but if you do that, you’ll see the young local photographer on Instagram documenting housing issues, or the mom with three kids updating neighbors on city council votes, or the local environmental organization offering residents info tours of superfund sites near their homes. You’ll see an existing news ecosystem, people that with some support and training could expand the trusted information networks they’ve developed organically. That’s why we make our strategies and lessons learned available to anyone up for the hard work of listening through our Civic Media Playbook. 

Democratizing the tools needed to map information needs, and offering microgrants as they do the work, means people can make this part of their local civic process, and it will enable and empower communities to identify both gaps and solutions. 

More community mapping projects means that funders and civic media resource organizations are freed up to invest their money and talents in ground-up projects. It’s time to identify and acknowledge what’s already growing in community backyards around the country, and support those information gardens. If we establish that collaboration, we can begin to grow equitable ecosystems that everyone can feel represented in, and benefit civically from.