News Blog

There are three tactical ways local newsrooms can be the conveners for their communities: designing for human connection, designing for everyday usefulness and designing for joy, curiosity and surprise.

Share how the American Press Institute helped change how you lead, think or serve your community — and pay it forward to those shaping local news next.

Impact-minded organizations build habits that help them notice what their communities are responding to, interpret what those signals might mean and adapt their journalism while the work is still unfolding.

Across all of our work, we’ve learned that the best solutions start with the people closest to the problem. We use evidence to inform what we do, create room to experiment and share what we learn so others can build on it.

Everyone in the newsroom needs to not only recognize impact signals but frame their work through an impact lens. One way to do this is by making this discussion part of the editorial process before an article is written or a project is published.

Identifying deeper impact signals your newsroom wants to track and engaging colleagues from across your organization on what impact they want their work to have.

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?

Ambassador64 is helping Rocky Mountain Public Media build two-way communication channels and grassroots advisory networks so more Coloradans can feel truly seen and heard, and our statewide civic fabric grows stronger.

To help us think about impact in a more structured way, one technique we’ve developed is the impact strategy meeting. The goal is simple: Create focused time for us to strategize on how a project can have the most impact possible.

The sidebar Planet Detroit built so readers could participate gave us something we'd never had: a civic engagement rate we can compute story by story.