Director of communications
Emily Ristow is the director of communications at the American Press Institute, where she ensures solutions and actionable advice are delivered to local news leaders across API’s platforms and channels.
Previously, she served in the role of Director of Local News Transformation and managed the Major Market Table Stakes program and API’s alumni sprint cohorts and coordinated efforts across the various Table Stakes programs. The Digital Transformation Guide from the American Press Institute, written by Emily, highlights proven strategies from the Table Stakes program, which helped news leaders transform their organizations' journalism and business through intensive change management training.
Before coming to API, Emily worked for a decade in local news, including as Loyalty and Engagement News Director for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, her hometown newspaper. She helped develop and supervise the Journal Sentinel's strategy to grow its loyal audience and to double its digital subscribers and managed the newsroom's engagement strategy across digital platforms, including its sites, apps and social media accounts.
She has also worked as a social media editor, digital producer, copy editor and print designer. She graduated from the University of Missouri with degrees in journalism and political science.
More from the author
Make your stop doing list
As you’re having those conversations, be sure that you are testing your assumptions about why things are done and who they’re important to.
Prioritize Your Workload
As news teams begin thinking about their election coverage plans, it may feel like adding more tasks to an already full plate, with a fraction of the staff and resources they once had. But that doesn’t have to mean figuring out how to do more with less — maybe it’s doing less with less.
Turn your to-do list into a stop-doing list
We thought the list would be dominated by the things we do to fill print holes. Instead, we found there were a whole lot of digital tasks and initiatives we were doing that didn’t really accomplish our strategy or that took more time, effort and resources than we had available.
