A community of collaboration: How journalists and non-news experts can work together better

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The United States was founded on the idea that a free and thriving press is essential to an inclusive democracy.

Local media play a key role. These place-based outlets — whether long-standing like a legacy newspaper or nascent like a nonprofit news site — provide communities with the information they need to make decisions and thrive. News leaders at these organizations steward their resources and time to create journalism with text, audio, video and in-person engagement that helps people understand themselves, how they relate to their neighbors and even the world they inhabit. The policies, happenings and culture in your backyard affect you deeply and daily.

As important as the work is, however, local media face significant challenges.

Some of that is the business: “News deserts” are growing rapidly, with newspapers closing at an average rate of more than two a week. The pace leaves even the growing number of new nonprofit news sites and start-ups seemingly unable to make up the loss. Local TV news, often considered more stable, also shows signs for concern.

Other challenges are social and societal: With fewer journalists, Americans are less likely to know one and have personal familiarity with them as members of their community. Further, many local journalists who remain are burned out from their work conditions. The field is discussing ways to mitigate burnout, and isolating and naming drivers, such as moral injury. But many interventions depend on cultivating strong leadership capable of redesigning long-rooted systems and news culture.

These challenges don’t exist in a vacuum. They are influenced by and interlock with trends in communities and the country, such as economic and technological change, demographic and educational trends, and growing political polarization. Polarization, for instance, can threaten the ability to share factual reporting with the whole of a community. It creates space for misinformation and disinformation to fill the void, contributing to the overall decline of quality in the information ecosystem. As a downstream effect, it fosters an environment where journalists are unable to conduct some of the work safely. And it’s all worse if local media goes away. The presence of local journalism appears tied to political polarization; we know it increases when a paper closes.

Those who see the press as vital to democracy should care about these challenges. And for each, there is knowledge from other sectors that can help journalism.

Take polarization and its cousins: anti-democratic attitudes, political violence and partisan animosity. One antidote, the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, suggests how to significantly reduce inclinations toward all three. For example, correcting misperceptions about the other party — including those individuals’ willingness to take action to undermine democracy — lowers temperatures. The notions people hold appear to be a major challenge, one journalism seems primed and aligned to help address.

The press will be much more effective in serving people and strengthening democracy if it learns from what researchers are learning. In this case, journalists can use these findings to shape individual stories, beats, and how media outlets build relationships with and for communities.

Researchers, too, can strengthen their work if they learn more about journalism and the specific challenges news leaders face. Imagine if more such findings were directly applied to the choices within news leaders’ control, and also, if the journalists — skilled at asking questions — could push such researchers to refine the research questions they pose.

Bringing ideas from outside of journalism into the conversation about how journalism evolves organizationally and in how it serves communities has become a mark of our programming at the American Press Institute. And it is why this year we have embarked on an effort to better understand how to facilitate impressions that last, to understand how non-news experts and news leaders can best inform one another’s work.

With support from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, this report will help researchers and news leaders understand:

• A landscape for news leader and researcher interaction. We overview the range of ways news leaders and researchers are interacting, especially in the journalism support space. We’ve done so with an eye to where people are engaging around listening and learning in a fractured society.
• Insights specifically from our API Local News Summits, a major way we facilitate these exchanges at API. We reflect on how our staff sets the conditions for fruitful exchange between news leaders and non-news experts in these invitation-based events that we hold approximately three times a year. We outline what we’ve learned and what we’re working to improve.
• What strikes journalists about depolarization/bridging difference specifically; and what strikes researchers who have engaged with journalists. We distill resonant themes and ideas on this topic, sourced from participants in these relevant convenings, which included approximately 180 news leaders and 30 non-news experts total. 
• Recommendations for those who want to enhance such exchanges. Looking at all the information and drawing on our experience, we outline steps for interested stakeholders to augment or create new fruitful exchanges between researchers and journalists. We focus recommendations for nonprofits working to advance journalism or researchers and civil society groups that see common cause.

The report draws from a review of journalism support organization offerings; interviews with leaders at such organizations; direct experience organizing news leader and non-news expert interactions; and surveys with news leaders and interviews with non-news participants in API programming in 2023 and 2024. API, which as part of its programs provides grants to strengthen local news, has also helped support other entities with such pursuits. Trusting News, which has received major funding from API, and Perspectives, which has received event sponsorship funds from API, are included among examples.

We hope the insights spur conversation, action and intervention from stakeholders interested in bridging communities across lines of difference. Among the examples and takeaways, you will find that news leaders and non-news experts alike value the opportunity to think differently about the challenges in front of them, about how local news can change and how research can ask different questions.

We believe the press can connect and unify the American people, an essential component of the American experiment and, at a more basic level, for human flourishing. But we will be far more likely to succeed if we learn, evaluate and explore together, news leaders and researchers side by side.

 

This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation (funder DOI 501100011730) to better understand how local news leaders and researchers can learn from the other to improve local journalism and limit polarization in their communities (TWCF-2023-32603). The opinions expressed in this report and its excerpt are those of the organizer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.