The American Press Institute is convening its second API Local News Summit of 2025, addressing a challenge shared by local and community-based media of all types: commercial or nonprofit, rural or urban, start-up or legacy. In our current moment and going forward, how might local media bridge civically-oriented coverage and conversation across generations?
An inclusive democracy and society requires collaboration from all Americans, regardless of age. If local news organizations are sometimes described as “towns talking to themselves,” how can news leaders do their part to represent and include community perspectives from members of different age groups? The answers matter to democracy and the sustainability of news organizations. They matter to the personal and collective challenges we face — those arising from loneliness and the lack of social connection brought about by the pandemic.
With a national election behind us, one where age played prominently, now is the time for news organizations to embrace practices and behaviors that enable local cooperation across generations through coverage and engagement strategies.
This API Local News Summit on Civic Discourse Across Generations will take place June 11-12 in Denver, Colo. The two-day, solutions-oriented convening will explore:
- Innovative ways local media are structuring community engagement and coverage to highlight and enable conversation across generations
- Frameworks from outside of journalism that may help local media build bridges and healthy discourse across generations
- Possibilities and untapped potential to embrace cross-generational conversation as an emphasis in local journalism’s mission, enhancing its chances for sustainability
API Local News Summits are highly participatory, invitation-based events that provide a welcoming and collaborative space for media leaders to think boldly about the role of the free press in the future of our communities. Our participant limit of between 60 and 80 journalism leaders and experts from non-news spaces encourages actionable ideas in an environment that facilitates open discussion. Additionally, every attendee is actively pursuing the summit challenge.
While invitation-based, we want to grow this network of news leaders committed to embracing local media as convener and with keen awareness — and receipts — of convening across generations. Many work in different mediums or silos, unaware of others who are experimenting with events, coverage approaches and experiences that touch this theme:
- deliberative-style gatherings geared toward solving shared challenges among residents;
- events that build social connection between older and younger residents;
- source tracking and auditing to represent voices;
- collaborations with trusted messengers, schools or retirement communities; and
- other creative distribution strategies online (or in print) that reach generations where they consume news.
Further, we know that external engagement in the community and internal engagement among those who produce the news are intertwined. Experiments in collaborations with student journalists, storytelling with older residents, and direct lessons from failure and success across generations in one’s newsroom — these experiences all have lessons for how we carry out such intergenerational work in our communities.
If you have ideas about how news leaders can consider the bonds that tie communities together across age — and you have built that into your engagement, journalism and business strategies — we’d like to extend this call for participation in our summit.
Request an invitation for the remaining spots at our summit via this form by Wednesday, May 7, at 11:59 p.m. ET. API has a limited amount of travel funds to help offset participation costs, allowing those invited to request up to $750 to cover travel and lodging.
Any potential news leader participant must agree to:
- Attend the duration of the two-day program
- Follow Chatham House Rule
In the coming months, expect more from API on civic discourse across generations via our Need to Know newsletter and our website.
Sponsors or funders help make API Local News Summits accessible and equitable and enable insights to extend beyond the summit room. For this event, we are grateful for support from the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism and Wallace House Center for Journalists at the University of Michigan. If you’re also interested in supporting this summit or API’s wider focus on Civic Discourse and Democracy, please email funding@pressinstitute.org.
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At the American Press Institute, we believe the need for more engaged and informed communities will continue to grow. It’s why we focus on the role the press can play in community and civic life, and in facilitating discussions across communities with all of their varied voices and constituencies.
We’ve gathered reflections from researchers in social science who have attended recent API Local News Summits, where they had the chance to interact with and explore how their work helps — and can be improved by insights from — local journalism.
The press will be much more effective in serving people and strengthening democracy if it learns from what researchers are learning. 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.
