Organizational resilience is built through everyday practice

The groundwork of resilient news organizations is usually laid by unremarkable, seemingly small, daily decisions: what not to do, how clearly a staff grasps what its community values and whether the business side and the newsroom are operating off the same set of facts or two different ones.

It’s a hard story to tell, because it doesn’t map easily onto launch announcements, traffic highs or other milestones. But these decisions may be the thing that determines whether an organization is able to adapt and continue serving its community.

Through working with local news organizations and teams via coaching, programs and research — including helping newsrooms understand and interpret their data with Metrics for News and Source Matters — the American Press Institute has seen how outlets build resilience through interpreting data and evidence together, making informed decisions and adapting to what isn’t working.

Build a shared language across departments

Just because data can track a lot of different things, it doesn’t mean it should. There’s real value in journalists understanding, at least roughly, how their reporting resonates with readers. That doesn’t mean coverage should chase the most page views. It means journalists can tell whether a particular story is helping meet the organization’s mission, as opposed to simply keeping the wire busy.

That kind of literacy works best when it doesn’t stay confined to the newsroom. When revenue, audience and product teams are reading the same numbers the same way editorial staff are, an organization can move on a bet with more confidence, because there’s already agreement across departments about what success looks like before the bet is made.

Newsday put this into practice behind a hard paywall, where the volume of pageviews are less meaningful. Its entire newsroom, not just its digital staff, needed a shared read on what actually drove subscriber loyalty. By building Metrics for News into daily editorial meetings, Newsday gave every editor a shared view of engagement and reader behavior. Editors are now finding real demand in under-covered community topics and building a more systematic approach to localizing national news for readers across Long Island.

Build the discipline to say no

Every newsroom produces some coverage that isn’t bad, exactly, but isn’t building anything either: it’s the daily churn that fills space without moving readers any closer to what the organization is trying to accomplish. What separates organizations with real staying power is whether they’re organized enough, and honest enough, to identify that work and act on it.

That discipline doesn’t only apply to coverage decisions. News organizations benefit from developing a practice of reviewing initiatives and products to determine when they stop meeting their goals and need to sunset. In our Product Development Sprint, in partnership with News Product Alliance, teams learned that evaluating a product’s value over time is an integral part of a sustainable business.

One team in the sprint uncovered through its experimentation that while their audience research correctly showed people were invested in video content, their research wasn’t specific enough and the coverage topics matter as much as the medium. Based on the data, they made the tough choice to sunset the project and not launch a second season. The instinct to say no has to be built into the organization, not just exercised in the moment.

Act on what the data reveals

Saying no to what isn’t working is only half the discipline. The other half is recognizing an opportunity early enough to actually act on it, before a hunch has time to harden into an assumption nobody bothers to test.

Crain Communications’ Detroit newsroom had a single reporter covering West Michigan when Metrics for News data showed her coverage was resonating with readers on both sides of the state, not just locally. Rather than treating that as a curiosity, Crain leaned into it. They grew the coverage, kept watching the data to confirm the demand, and in 2023, they launched an entirely new newsroom, Crain’s Grand Rapids Business, its fifth city brand. The data didn’t just describe what was already happening. It gave Crain the confidence to commit real resources to a market it hadn’t planned to enter.

It can also be useful to look beyond your individual organizational data to research that shows how people consume news, what influences their trust and how their relationships with journalism are evolving. For example, our work with the Media Insight Project has surfaced strategies local news leaders can try to adapt to changing news habits.

Measure what journalism actually does

Web traffic is not journalism, and shouldn’t be treated as the whole scorecard. Measuring the value of journalism to communities, readers and society is genuinely hard. For years, our research has focused on how to use data to better understand news organizations’ work, which led to two tools built for that purpose: Metrics for News and Source Matters. Both were shaped through years of iteration with news organizations, and both were designed to produce scorecards actually relevant to what those organizations are trying to do.

The AP Fund for Journalism put that principle to work for newsrooms that often lack the budget for a dedicated product hire or the tools that come with one. Among them: The Connecticut Mirror, Arizona Luminaria and Bucks County Beacon. Our research and data models now power a shared dashboard used by ten of these organizations to track the performance of AP reporting in their markets alongside their own original coverage. As Rachel Aretakis, APFJ’s director of impact strategy, put it: “We also want to learn how sharing measurement infrastructure can deepen our impact as well as the impact of our local newsroom partners.”

The same instinct applies to who shows up in the coverage, not just how it performs. Conecta Arizona joined a cohort of newsrooms using Source Matters to track the diversity of sources quoted in its stories, a way of finding gaps in coverage before those gaps become a pattern the community notices first.

None of this amounts to a new observation tied to a new product. It’s the accumulated lesson of working with hundreds of news organizations trying to build sustainable habits through years of industry change.

Looking ahead

Website traffic and subscription counts are a starting point, but they don’t capture the full value of journalism to communities. As search and referral traffic become less predictable, that gap grows more consequential. In the coming year, API is focused on helping newsrooms hold two kinds of value at once: monetary and community, quantitative and qualitative. Newsrooms that learn to hold both will be far better positioned to make their case to readers, funders and their own boards.

That evolution isn’t new. It’s the product of more than a decade of iteration directly with the newsrooms using API tools, time spent coaching news leaders and organizations in API programs and research on what matters to news consumers.

Strong data can’t make the tough decisions for a news organization, but it can give them the knowledge to make better decisions.

Yoni Greenbaum is the vice president of product strategy at the American Press Institute. He joined API in 2025. He can be reached at yoni.greenbaum@pressinstitute.org.

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