Conclusion: Is Offline Wireless an Option for News Distribution?

Since the inception of the You Are Here project nearly two years ago, a great deal has changed in the world of digital distribution, both online and off. Audiences are at once more concentrated and more divided than ever before,³⁸ while threats to open distribution loom large.³⁹ Likewise, there were no fully open-source, offline wireless systems available two years ago, while today one can also build a Raspberry Pi(rateBox)—though the reach and functionality of You Are Here remain distinct. Perhaps most significantly, however, the fragility inherent in the largely centralized structure of the internet has become even more apparent, as both attacks⁴⁰ and accidents⁴¹ have caused major disruptions in service, and will likely do so more in the future.⁴² The question is how news organizations can continue to publish when the medium they rely on—in this case, the internet—is increasingly unreliable.

It is actually a question that the industry has faced before. In the early twentieth century, scores of American newspapers folded when paper shipping interruptions caused by World War I nearly tripled the cost of paper, escalating it from forty-five dollars per ton in 1910 to one hundred and twelve dollars per ton in 1920. At the time, newspapers were “printing hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies on a daily basis,” according to Michael Stamm, an associate professor of history at Michigan State. The media organizations that thrived, however, were those that began building their own infrastructure, from forests to paper mills. ``In some ways," says Stamm, “bandwidth is now what paper used to be.”

Unlike paper supplies, however, internet bandwidth isn’t really within news organizations’ power to expand or control. Much as paper copies of newspapers and magazines continue to be sold at newsstands, though, news organizations can use offline wireless devices like You Are Here to solve the key problem of news distribution, which in Stamm’s view means getting it “into people’s hands.”

Fortunately, the devices needed to do so are already in people’s hands—all that’s needed is a more independent way to get them there. Moreover, the scope of our experimental You Are Here installations suffered from a number of limitations that established news organizations wouldn’t face: They could easily install such devices at partner businesses or existing newsstands, as well as efficiently communicate to users the availability and purpose of such a service.

On a technical level, then, You Are Here offers a clear roadmap for anyone wishing to create an inexpensive, open-source, privacy-respecting, and local-only digital publication and engagement space (for instructions, including recommended hardware and the software we created and used for this project, visit: https://github.com/TowCenter/YouAreHere). In addition to testing, vetting, and troubleshooting a hardware and software system (culled from a dizzying array of possibilities), the public You Are Here installations helped answer essential questions about hosting a large number of users and extending the reach and stability of open-source, wireless nodes. Going forward, the You Are Here system could be installed in public or semi-public locations and run continuously with relatively little ongoing monitoring or maintenance.

We believe that creating similarly offline distribution points for news offers enormous opportunities for localization, community-building, and resilience. Whether the news outlet is a local blog, weekly newspaper, or national daily, the technology of the You Are Here nodes provides a unique opportunity to listen and to share with a truly local group of voices without interference from online ad networks, long-distance internet trolls, or reliance on third-party hosting services. We look forward to continued work on You Are Here, and exploring the communities, engagement, and distribution opportunities that offline networks can help develop and support in the future.