This week’s action: Listen to your community to better understand the information they need.
News leaders must navigate near-constant change. But they can’t lose sight of this key question: What do your community members need from your journalism to navigate their daily lives and better participate in civic life?
The roles you play in your audience members’ lives — in your community’s life — reveal the value local news offers in today’s changing world.
That has long been the case, even if the stakes feel different today as commercial and nonprofit news organizations are part of an increasingly fractured media landscape. That’s why one of our focus areas at the American Press Institute is civic trust.
Civic trust is bigger than whether people trust a news organization. It includes the role local media can play in helping people understand their communities, participate in civic life and navigate differences with one another.
Through our work with news organizations, we’ve seen how civic life can be strengthened by better listening, identifying new ways to share useful information and looking beyond journalism for partners and ideas.
- Listen first: Through community advisory boards and listening sessions, Pittsburgh news organizations learned that community members may have different ideas on what topics are most important to cover. This key lesson came from their work with API and our Inclusion Index, which has brought together local media organizations over several years to improve trust with communities of color.
- Consider new paths for engagement and distribution: Addressing civic life directly isn’t just about what information is shared; the way it is shared is just as important. Through API challenge funds, The Dallas Morning News, The City Reporter and Factchequado focused on community engagement and experimented with new distribution methods for their election reporting to reach new audiences.
- Look outside journalism: Other organizations may be wrestling with similar civic challenges. Collaborating with non-journalism organizations can help you see challenges in a different light and spark new solutions. A leader at WEHCO Media attending an API Local News Summit met the organization Made By Us, which sparks youth engagement with another civic institution: museums. They later collaborated, along with the Clinton Presidential Center, on collecting “Letters to America“ from youth ages 5-25.
We’ll start with that important first step: listening.
Try this
Start here: Pick a recurring coverage area that helps people get information they need in their daily lives and participate in their communities.
Take action: Reach out to five community members with different experiences and perspectives and ask them about the coverage area: what questions do they have, what information is hard to find and what do they need to know in their daily lives?
Reflect: What potential weaknesses in your coverage did their questions bring to mind? How might you adapt your coverage plans to address these gaps?
Dig deeper
- The future of local news should be anchored in civic trust
- What a local news advisory committee taught Pittsburgh newsrooms
- How journalists and non-news experts can work together better
- How local opinion journalism serves civic discourse and democracy
Join us in celebrating API’s 80th anniversary
- Share your story. We know the most valuable insights often live in people’s experiences and relationships. Tell us about an API gathering, idea, person or experience that shaped how you led or thought about your work.
- Help another leader find their way to API. Share this series, a program or an article with someone who might benefit.
- Donate to support the leaders who come next. A gift of any size helps us continue equipping local news leaders with ideas, research, relationships and practical support.
