What the Proximity Paradox and NFCB’s Rural Research tell us about listening, local information and becoming indispensable.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something that feels almost upside down.
We live in a time when I can know within minutes what is happening in Washington, London or Manila. News from across the country and around the world is constantly within reach.
But what happened at last night’s town meeting? Why is the road closed? Where is the cooling center? What’s happening with the school budget? Where can someone find child care, elder care or transportation?
Those questions can be surprisingly harder to answer.
There is now research giving this phenomenon a name: the Proximity Paradox.
The Civic Information Needs Census (CINC) found in its February 2026 national research that 44% of respondents said it was difficult to get information about what was happening in their own neighborhood and 42% said the same about their city or town. By comparison, only 26% said national information was difficult to get and 30% said the same about information from around the world.
The information closest to our daily lives may actually be harder to find than information about places thousands of miles away.
Subsequent CINC research in communities including Chicago, Tampa Bay, Marin County and Arkansas has continued to find versions of the same pattern.
I keep coming back to this research because it gives us another way to understand what NFCB’s Rural Research has been telling us.
The Proximity Paradox isn’t a rural problem. But its consequences can be different in rural places.
That’s an important distinction.
CINC is finding unmet local information needs across geography, demographics and politics. This isn’t something unique to rural America.
But NFCB’s Rural Research suggests that the consequences of an information gap can become more significant when there are fewer alternatives.
Our research partners at City Square Associates helped us describe this as a thinner safety net.
When a local newsroom disappears, there may not be another reporter covering the county.
When broadband is unreliable, there may not be another provider.
When a hospital or service closes, the next option may be an hour away.
When emergency information is distributed primarily online, some residents may be relying on a single smartphone — or connectivity that doesn’t work reliably.
That’s where I see the connection.
The issue isn’t simply whether information exists. The issue is whether people can actually find it, trust it and use it when they need it.
And that leads to a different question for community radio:
What does our community need to be informed, connected, safe and able to participate — and what role are we uniquely positioned to play?
An information ecosystem is bigger than a media ecosystem.
Information doesn’t move only through radio stations and newspapers.
It moves through libraries, schools, Tribal governments, emergency managers, health centers, grocery stores, post offices, churches, community organizations, Facebook groups, bulletin boards and conversations between neighbors.
That’s the actual information ecosystem.
Our work with Listening Post Collective reinforced this. Their Civic Information Index can help identify places where civic-information conditions deserve a closer look. Research can help us understand patterns.
But data can only take us so far.
An index can tell us where to look.
Research can tell us what patterns are emerging.
Neither can tell us exactly what a particular community needs.
For that, we have to ask.
Then we have to be willing to change.
Five NFCB stations did exactly that through Signals from the Airwaves, our partnership with Listening Post Collective.
What interests me most now isn’t simply what they heard.
It’s what happened because they listened.
On Kauaʻi, KKCR heard that residents wanted more locally specific information about housing, tourism, infrastructure, environmental protection and government accountability.
The answer wasn’t automatically: KKCR needs to build a newsroom.
Instead, the station began thinking about collaboration with other news organizations while focusing its own limited resources on the hyperlocal information it was uniquely positioned to provide.
At KUYI Hopi Radio, community members identified a need for clearer emergency and public-safety information. The station used those findings to deepen conversations with Hopi law enforcement, emergency services and Tribal leadership.
At WMMT in Eastern Kentucky, listening surfaced gaps around disaster preparedness. The station subsequently helped establish the Letcher County Emergency Preparedness Cohort, bringing together first responders, public officials, mutual-aid organizations and community leaders.
At KWSO in Warm Springs, Oregon, residents reminded us that useful information infrastructure doesn’t always need to be technologically sophisticated.
People still relied on bulletin boards.
The station began exploring electronic information displays in places residents already visit.
A partnership.
A relationship with emergency services.
A preparedness network.
A better bulletin board.
None of those is simply a new radio program.
They are changes in relationships, priorities and organizational strategy.
That’s what listening can do.
You can read more about these examples and NFCB’s Rural Research in my recent Pressing Issues article, “Want Better Media? Start by Listening to What Communities Say They Need.”
Listening isn’t audience research
This may be the lesson I most want us to carry forward.
Community listening isn’t simply asking existing listeners what they want to hear on the radio.
It is a way of questioning our assumptions.
What if the community doesn’t need another program?
What if it needs the station to convene people who aren’t talking to one another?
What if another organization can provide the journalism, but our station is better positioned to make sure people know it exists?
What if our most important role is making emergency information easier to find?
And perhaps the hardest question:
What are we willing to stop doing because we listened?
That question matters enormously right now.
We don’t have to become bigger to become more indispensable.
Community media is navigating a period of extraordinary constraint. Stations are being asked to do more while operating with fewer resources.
We cannot respond to every newly identified community need by adding another program, another project or another responsibility.
And maybe we shouldn’t.
The Proximity Paradox tells us there is a problem: people can have greater difficulty finding information about their own communities than information about the nation or the world.
NFCB’s Rural Research adds another piece: when the local safety net is thinner, those information gaps can matter even more.
And our community-listening work offers a way forward:
Don’t assume you know what the gap is. Ask.
Then figure out what role your station is actually best positioned to play.
Sometimes that will mean journalism. Sometimes emergency information. Sometimes partnership or convening. Sometimes it will mean music, language and culture — the emotional infrastructure that creates connection and belonging and helps make trust possible in the first place.
And sometimes it will mean recognizing that someone else can do something better than we can.
That isn’t retreat.
It’s focus.
Small community organizations aren’t going to solve every problem in the information ecosystem. Nor should they try.
But they can know their communities extraordinarily well. They can understand where information isn’t moving. They can know whom people trust. They can connect institutions that aren’t connected. And they can understand the particular role that only they can play.
Maybe that’s the question worth carrying into this fall:
Not: How can we do more?
But: What does our community need from us that it cannot easily get somewhere else?
The Proximity Paradox tells us why that question is increasingly urgent.
Listening is how we begin to answer it.
And being willing to change because of what we hear is how we become indispensable.
Sources
Civic Information Needs Census. “The Proximity Paradox.” 2026.
https://infocensus.org/share/proximity-paradox
Civic Information Needs Census. Data and Methodology.
https://www.civicinfocensus.org/data
A. Rima Dael. “Want Better Media? Start by Listening to What Communities Say They Need.” Pressing Issues, August 21, 2026.
https://pressingissues.org/better-media-listening-to-what-communities-say/
