In late August, the mayor of Greensboro, North Carolina took to LinkedIn to voice a frustration: “A city of Greensboro’s size and significance deserves stronger [news] coverage,” she wrote. “It deserves a news ecosystem that reflects its energy, complexity, and future. Supporting local reporting isn’t just about newspapers — it’s about sustaining an informed, connected community.”

She’s right. Greensboro is the largest city in a metro area with more than one million residents, and recent research from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack shows that there are about five working journalists for every 100,000 people in Greensboro’s home county. Nationwide, that figure was at 40 working journalists per 100,000 people just two decades ago.

Of course, Greensboro — which lost its beloved alt-weekly, Triad City Beat, earlier this year — is not alone. More and more U.S. communities are finding themselves in a barren information environment. People are increasingly left in the dark about what’s happening in their city halls, their schools and their neighborhoods, as corporate consolidation and relentless layoffs hollow out the news industry.

The federal defunding of public media will make things worse. Non-commercial, public-interest news organizations are already struggling over a diminishing pool of resources, and the competition for funding will now get even fiercer.

Amid the federal chaos and industry doom, a sharp reality has come into relief: We need bold action from local levels of government. High-quality local news and civic information are true public goods, and right now, the market simply cannot (and will not) create these goods at the scale that our communities need. This moment calls for new public infrastructure to support informed communities, and cities are uniquely equipped to be on the frontlines of this burgeoning movement.

In a few cities, this work is starting to get underway. In New York and Chicago, city officials enacted measures that require half of government advertising budgets to be directed towards community news outlets, and the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco has adopted a similar resolution. In Washington, D.C. and Seattle, advocates and city leaders have pushed for a publicly-funded news voucher system, in which residents are issued vouchers to donate to local outlets of their choice.

And there have been exciting initial discussions of even more substantive solutions. The Community Information Cooperative has proposed that local policymakers set up “info districts” to fund media initiatives that meet local information needs. These would be similar to other kinds of established districts (business improvement and library districts are two examples), and they would operate similarly – funded by a local tax and governed by a public board to ensure accountability.

In San Francisco, meanwhile, a local coalition of independent media leaders facilitated by Common Cause California is starting up a drumbeat for a public grantmaking program to support local news. This idea, which is increasingly being taken up by state lawmakers, is perhaps best modeled by the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. The consortium is an independent 501(c)(3) that receives annual public funding from the legislature, with grantmaking overseen by a diverse board of community stakeholders and media experts. The New Jersey initiative has distributed more than $10 million in public funds to newsrooms and organizations working to plug the most critical info gaps across the state, with a focus on sustainability and communities underserved by our media system.

Lawmakers in Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have all advanced proposals to create their own consortiums. California is in the process of creating something that could be quite similar: a Civic Media Fund, run in partnership with the state library, that aims to bolster community news coverage.

There’s no reason that cities shouldn’t take up this cause, too. Even a few million dollars in grants annually, a tiny sliver of many city budgets, could unlock massive benefits for civic health. Many cities engage in other forms of public grantmaking already in support of the arts, public health and civic innovation.

This would be a wise area of focus to add to the mix: Robust local news ecosystems have been linked to higher voter turnout, lower levels of government corruption, lower levels of government waste, and a stronger sense of community cohesion. If city grantmaking funds are housed outside of government, like in New Jersey, then they could receive philanthropic contributions, too, catalyzing a public-private partnership to support local news.

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all blueprint for cities, just as there’s no single fix for reviving our ailing media system. If the collapse of local news has taught us anything, it’s that we have to pursue a broad range of bold, innovative solutions. This moment calls for policy experimentation and democratic pathfinding, roles that city governments are uniquely equipped to play.

Cities have long been proving grounds for transformative ideas in housing, environmental policy, public health, and civic engagement. They can take a similar leadership role here in helping shape the future of our community media system.

It won’t happen by itself. Civic leaders and community media leaders will need to get organized, and show city officials that the fate of local news and civic information is a cause worth investing in. This requires broad multi-stakeholder coalitions that bridge the interests of journalists, civic leaders and the communities they serve. National networks like the Media Power Collaborative are helping facilitate these conversations, and local action and organizing is where the rubber will actually meet the road.

Our news and information crisis is deepening by the day, fueled by federal attacks on press freedom and the destruction of public-media infrastructure. But there are promising signs that we can overcome these challenges. An emerging wave of journalists, storytellers, organizers and community leaders are forging a new future for local news. After decades of inaction, there’s a growing understanding that public support will need to be part of the solution.

After all, the health and structure of our media system, and whose interests it serves, are the result of policy choices — ones we have the ability to influence, especially at the local level. We can kickstart this organizing work in our cities while laying the groundwork for national change.

This post was originally published on Next City.