22 ideas to steal from the API Influencer Learning Cohort

The American Press Institute has begun publishing takeaways from a new program to help local media collaborate with trusted messengers and influencers. In the coming weeks, we’ll share more from participants. We’ll also share new resources, informed by the cohort and others, to help local news leaders explore this work in their community. Sign up to receive updates when we share more findings from this initiative.

 

After four months of learning and experiments, our American Press Institute and Knight Election Hub cohort on influencer collaborations has concluded.

The six participating news organizations represented a range of media types, geographies and communities:

• Public Source (Pennsylvania)
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Georgia)
• THE CITY (New York)
• WSOC-TV (North Carolina)
• Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (Wisconsin)
• Factchequeado (nationwide)

Each spent time learning out loud as they walked through this process during the election season. Now, we’re excited to share more — hopefully enabling more newsrooms to explore what partnering with influencers, creators and trusted messengers can look like.

Below, you’ll find four purposes for an influencer collaboration, a “focus” for each purpose (i. what it does for your shared community) and story ideas. These ideas have been refined for clarity but inspired by our cohort.

We’ve also gone further to offer you “the why” for each category of ideas to steal. Much has been researched and written about Americans’ relationship with social media and the personalities or behaviors that dominate this relationship. We hope our whys might further your interest in exploring these collaborations to unlock community engagement and increase organizational capacity.

Influencer collaborations can be a path to:

1. Highlight your newsroom and your journalists

The Focus: Build trust, humanize journalism and engage with the community

The Ideas:

1. Introduce who we are and explain what we do as a newsroom
2. Share stories of how our community has engaged with our news outlet, especially their exposure and relatability to our journalists
3. Host fireside-chat or sofa-style conversations asking trusted messengers what they’re hearing from their communities
4. Answer community questions: “Why isn’t this issue being covered?” “Whatever happened to ____?”
5. Feature a newsroom “guest” to explain stories and engage directly with the influencer’s community

The Why: The recent Pew Research Center study on America’s News Influencers found that about one-in-five Americans, including 37% of adults under 30, regularly get news from online influencers. The findings highlight the role personal connections have in receiving the news. People also tend to trust the intent of local news more than national news. But as Trusting News shows, demonstrating that transparency, responsiveness and relevance is key to earning this trust.

As news consumers increasingly trust their judgment over institutions, local journalism can work more intentionally to foster authentic connections and prove reliability.

2. Simplify local processes and provide clear guides

The Focus: Help the community navigate essential services and local systems

The Ideas:

1. Explain how local offices operate and how community services are delivered
2. Share logistics for accessing resources, such as language support, disability access and public service hours
3. Provide links to helpful and/or reported tools, guides and resources for addressing local challenges
4. Create an FAQ answering community questions (e.g., “What should I do if my trash pickup was missed?”)

The Why: As audiences fill their news needs with influencer connections and engagement, there may be a rising demand for easy-to-understand guides to cut through the noise and keep up with what the audience wants. Influencers often present information in concise, engaging formats, such as short videos and infographics, making complex topics more digestible. By adopting similar content and presentation strategies — especially through collaboration — local news reporting can enhance its clarity and engagement, ensuring essential information about local services reaches and resonates with the community.

Echoing this, one takeaway from our learning cohort was the idea of getting more creative and having “a bit more fun” when presenting stories and connecting with the audience while sharing news.

3. Inspire action and show impact

The Focus: Motivate participation and highlight community-driven change

The Ideas:

1. Emphasize that “Your voice really does matter”
2. Show how community involvement can create meaningful change
3. Share stories of how people made decisions or took action using the information and resources newsrooms provided
4. Ask residents what’s at stake for them in key local issues (e.g., housing, education, transportation)
5. Create a “Come with me” story to spotlight how people participate in community activities or access services
6. Demystify local processes and roles with “Humans of NY”-style stories about people making a difference, such as volunteers, public service workers or neighborhood leaders

The Why: The U.S. Surgeon General emphasizes that social connection is a fundamental human need, vital for both mental and physical health. Local news organizations, as community conveners and connectors, may be able to bridge online connection with offline isolation by sharing impactful stories and encouraging meaningful community involvement. When our news resonates, we inform our community and encourage affinity while addressing the growing issues of loneliness and isolation.

4. Share experiences and build connection

The Focus: Showcase real stories that resonate with audiences

The Ideas:

1. Translate our reporting archive into a conversation or education series featuring our local identity, history and nostalgia
2. Collaborate on a “day in the life” of local changemakers, such as community organizers, public service workers or small business owners
3. Highlight personal stories: “This changed me, and I want you to try it too.”
4. Show how individuals use our journalism and its impact on their lives
5. Demonstrate how our stories and resources spark meaningful conversations
6. Walk communities through how they interpret and apply our resources (e.g., understanding housing trends or small business opportunities)
7. Share feature-style stories “by the numbers” (e.g., community programs launched, busiest public spaces, or local projects completed)

The Why: Research from the American Press Institute shows that 60% of Gen Z and Millennials are paying for or donating to news of some kind. Many pay for or donate to the work of independent creators — those they likely find valuable and relatable, highlighting the power of authentic, meaningful content. By leveraging the personal experiences of your local community and its trusted messengers, your journalism can become part of the equation for fostering a sense of belonging. Additionally, by optimizing your partnerships and storytelling for connection, your newsroom can help strengthen social bonds, engage younger audiences and contribute to healthier, more connected communities.

If you are interested in helping your news organization embrace collaborations such as these, please contact us to hear how we might help. And if you are interested in partnering or financially supporting such efforts to help local news increase social trust and decrease polarization through active partnerships with trusted messengers, please let us know that, too.