Why Information is Critical

Welcome to Critical Information — notes and research from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Information is the critical resource of our time. We study how it’s created, distributed, and consumed, because we believe strong societies depend on good information — and because that belief is being tested right now, on every front.

This newsletter is where we think out loud. It’s less fully cooked than the peer-reviewed research and white papers we publish on our site — more like our working notes, written as we track the people doing the most interesting work across the media and information landscape, and as we trace the deepening convergence of media and politics.

This year marks the Shorenstein Center’s 40th anniversary, and we’re watching the terrain we study undergo some of the most intense disruption in our history. The threats to a free press are financial, political, and technological all at once, which means the response has to cross old lines too — between academia and civil society, public and private sectors. We learn constantly from journalists building new models on the front lines, technologists pushing tools meant to strengthen democratic life rather than erode it, and policymakers arguing over where the guardrails should go.

Forty years in, we still think the central question hasn’t changed: what does it take for people to get good information, and for societies to act on it. That’s what we’re here to work out, in public, as we go. Let us know what you think.