Welcome to September’s Need to Know Special Edition on identifying and acting on the impact of your work. This week’s action: Identify important impact signals your newsroom might be receiving but isn’t taking note of.
Local newsrooms are confident in measuring what they publish and produce, but a bit less certain about measuring what their work changes. Defining impact differently — much less quantifying it — isn’t a universal practice, but acknowledging that impact is plural is a good place to start.
If you were to ask each member of your news organization to craft a six-word impact story, you’d get just as many types of impact as you have people in the room. In fact, an informal analysis of more than 200 API Local News Summit attendee surveys, including from our most recent summit on measuring impact for civic discourse, found that there isn’t a single type of local news impact.
So how do we bridge that gap between the standard KPIs and those mushier signals of your work’s impact — how can you identify and quantify what’s changing in the lives and perceptions of the communities you serve?
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