Prologue
On an early Sunday afternoon in late October of 2012, mobile phones across New York began sounding the harsh, electronic bleat of the city’s emergency warning system, signaling the imminent arrival of Hurricane Sandy. Over the next few days, large swathes of the city would flood, isolating residents unable or unwilling to evacuate. Flooding also took out power and telecommunications in whole neighborhoods, leaving residents without access to basic news and emergency updates. Compounding these challenges, data centers in Manhattan were also hard-hit, taking news organizations like BuzzFeed and Gawker offline.6
In the aftermath of the storm, downed internet connections left aid workers and government officials struggling to gather information and coordinate efforts.7 8 Yet Sandy’s impact on connectivity wasn’t entirely unprecedented: 2005’s Hurricane Katrina took out seventy percent of the cell towers in New Orleans.9 In the intervening years, however, more than one-third of American housebolds became “wireless-only.” 10 11 By mid-2017, the Center for Disease Control found that just over half of all American households were wireless-only.12 While the vast majority of Americans still own and listen to AM/FM radio broadcasts,13 most news outlets do not have access to the airwaves. For many media organizations, this means that when the internet goes out, their publishing stops cold.
While large swaths of Brooklyn remained disconnected in the days and weeks following Hurricane Sandy, there was one neighborhood that stayed online: The Red Hook Housing Project, located between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the waters of of the Red Hook Channel in northwest Brooklyn, was home to an existing “mesh networking” project started by the Red Hook Initiative (RHI) in 2011.14
The concept behind RHI’s efforts was simple: By tethering a wireless router to a single working internet connection and then interconnecting it to other wireless routers in a “mesh,” a single broadband connection could provide wireless internet access across an entire neighborhood. After Sandy, RHI used a landline connection from Brooklyn Fiber to provide connectivity to the existing routers it had set up on the tops of buildings in the area. While the network provided much-needed internet access in the weeks and months after the storm, RHI affiliate Georgia Bullen points out that in many cases the internet connectivity is not necessarily the most crucial aspect of these wireless hotspots. “A lot of what you need doesn’t change that often,” says Bullen, now technology projects director at New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. Reference content, such as maps and guides for example, need only occasional updating. Moreover, the wireless nodes lend themselves to flexible placement. “They don’t take very much power,” she says. After Sandy, “We ran a couple of them off of twelve-hour power supplies.” Thanks to these semi-autonomous, local wireless nodes, the the local Red Hook community was able to access essential information even while the internet was down.
In today’s digital news business, of course, it may seem anathema to update information only occasionally. Yet when one considers the resurgent popularity of digital newsletters and continued relevance of digital “Today’s Paper” offerings from existing news organizations, audiences seem to be indicating an interest in news that is both more episodic and more local 15 16. Plus, in an increasingly monitored and fragile online environment, the idea of offline wireless distribution points offers the chance to provide both news publishers and audiences with digital spaces where, as Wired columnist Clive Thompson describes it, “one can talk—and listen—in private.”17 Moreover, whether an internet disruption is the result of political, technical, or natural events, offline wireless networks can help media organizations ensure that despite such circumstances their news can continue to reach readers when they need it most.
Over the past twenty-five years, the internet’s potential for global reach has proved a double-edged sword for professional journalism. On the one hand, the web has opened up new audiences and reporting methods; on the other, it has gutted business models and fragmented audiences. Perhaps even less anticipated is the increased homogeneity of the news ecosystem, with even global media organizations tending to “all emphasize the same thing,” as Google News creator Krishna Bharat observed in 2010.18
The centralization of news is not just a content phenomenon, however, but also a technical one. With the rise of web publishing, news media depends on a fairly limited distribution network—namely, the broadband connections and undersea cables that transmit all of the content on the internet, from news to Netflix.19 20
This highly centralized structure is a sharp departure from print distribution methods. Traditionally, newspapers were delivered to consumers by tens of thousands of “paperboys,”21 who were directly employed by the news organization. But while successful twentieth-century news outlets often owned everything from the trees, to the shipping routes, to the printing presses they relied on, 22 today’s digital-only news organizations are almost entirely dependent on internet for getting their product to audiences. Innovations in news distribution are often confined to content-sharing partnerships among existing news outlets (such as ProPublica’s partnerships with WNYC or the New York Daily News 23), or through deals with third-party platforms like Facebook and Apple News (many of which have proven ultimately unfavorable to publishers).24
Yet even these efforts all still depend on the same supporting infrastructure: the routing protocols and connectivity of the internet. One result is that if internet access is disrupted, whether due to cyberattack 25, government manipulation,26 natural disaster, or simple human error, 27 public access to information is severely reduced. When the internet is inaccessible, in other words, so is the news.