Welcome to API’s Year in Review series! It’s been a busy year for us: we resumed our in-person summits, expanded our training portfolio, revised our look and messaging, and offered numerous grants, products and programs to journalists. Members of our team have also been speaking to groups, classes and conventions across the country. Here are just some of the resources we offered to help foster healthy, responsive and resilient news organizations in 2023.
30 grants awarded
to local news organizations as part of our Civic Discourse and Community Listening Fund, Beyond Print Convening funding, and our Table Stakes sprint grants for Mobilizing News and Product Development.
Here are just a few ways grantees used these resources in 2023:
- The Keene Sentinel (New Hampshire) is enhancing its e-edition to improve readers’ experience, transition print subscribers to digital products and more.
- The National Trust for Local News is supporting a bilingual newsletter in Commerce City, Colorado.
- The Oaklandside (California) is enhancing its first-person storytelling series, Amplify Oakland, which helps community members share lived experiences on issues of public interest in collaboration with other local news outlets.
- Cardinal News (Virginia) is partnering with the Roanoke Collaboration Project to give people in their demographically and politically changing communities tools to engage in constructive dialogue. This includes creating an op-ed forum on their website.
- Sumter Item’s (South Carolina) “Next Generation” content vertical highlights high-achieving high-schoolers outside of sports
- The Fayetteville Observer (North Carolina) hosted a listening session at a Black-owned venue to connect with new key sources along with an informal follow-up event with these same women.
2500+ program participants
In 2023, we continued our work offering coaching, training cohorts and learning sessions, and we expanded our Journalism Programs portfolio to offer more support to news organizations.
We brought together industry leaders for two API Local News Summits on opinion and mental health. We also offered training to our civic discourse fund and election fund grantees, organized a virtual event on burnout and more.
“Great session, I appreciated that this was unique and in-depth and had unexpected guests and genuinely moved the conversation for our field forward.”
– Dana Coester, 100 Days in Appalachia, on API Local News Summit on Mental Health
We also kicked off a second Inclusion Index cohort with five news organizations to better engage communities of color in Pittsburgh and look forward to continuing our work in 2024.
Table Stakes offered sprint cohorts for program alumni on product development and community listening and building trust. We also worked with dozens of news organizations through monthly virtual sessions, an in-person gathering and coaching office hours.
Four newsrooms participated in API’s Beyond Print cohort, which included insights from industry leaders on topics such as building digital readiness and maximizing print revenue. The cohort concluded in early 2023; cohort participants and an additional 14 news organizations gathered in Detroit in June 2023 to share lessons.
Our other industry conference sessions and newsroom trainings reached about 730 journalists across 33 events. This included the Source Matters source diversity tracking cohort, 20 custom training sessions reaching 180 journalists and two Tech Talks events on newsletters and social media. We also supported newsrooms’ transition to Google Analytics 4 with sessions and office hours opportunities.
20 events
In addition to our API Local News Summits and the Beyond Print convening, API hosted an in-person Table Stakes alumni luncheon. We also offered three virtual events on engaging news readers during social media upheaval, newsletter strategies and navigating burnout as a journalist, as well as a reunion for Election Coverage and Community Listening Fund recipients.
Finally, we also hosted exclusive webinars for Table Stakes alumni, including one on creating your “stop doing” list happening today and another one on creating AI strategies for local newsrooms on Dec. 15. (Not sure if you are a TS alumni? Check here.)
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- API Year in Review 2023
- A year in content
- A year of products & programs
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We'll share some of the resources, tools and lessons learned from our training sessions and research help desk. We hope you can use these as you plan your continuing accountability coverage and start thinking about the next election on the horizon.
When community members are no longer voters, their needs become diffuse once again and there is no clear, focusing mandate. So many newsrooms slip back into the usual: politics coverage driven by politicians and press releases. How do we avoid that backslide?
How can we avoid that backslide this time?
We see in research how trusted messengers matter for news that’s shared. We know Millennials and Gen Z pay for or donate to support email newsletters or video or audio from independent creators at higher rates than newspapers.
