News Blog

Tomlin joins API after more than three decades in journalism and media leadership, most recently serving as chief news and membership officer at McClatchy, where she managed editorial and audience strategy across 30 local news organizations, including The Miami Herald and The Kansas City Star.

As research continues to inform this slice of the news industry, we’ll continue learning, too. Who gets to be called a journalist in 2025 and beyond? What is the future of trustworthy information, especially considering the access to and trust for online content creators? How might journalism adapt to the rise, or co-opt the styles, of news influencers?

Here are three simple principles any newsroom, of any size, can use to start building products that last longer, serve deeper and make your work more sustainable.

Here’s the challenge: Take a look at the last week of your coverage. Which pieces solved a problem? Which could have been reshaped into a product? Try this shift once and see how it feels. Not just for your audience, but for yourself.

What if we started looking at our output as a product, not a service? Too often, we think "product" means a fancy app or a new website. But product isn’t about tech. It’s about intention.

As the program and newsroom expand, Martinez shares how trust built with community listening and authentic engagement can be replicated in other community newsrooms across the country.

API's 2025 Influencers Learning Cohort helped local news organizations deepen engagement with the communities they serve through new experiments with creators and trusted messengers. You can read more about their work, in their own words, in the following case studies on API’s BetterNews.org.

We’ll look at how newsrooms and their creator partners can use engagement tools on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to deepen audience connection. Each of these platforms offers its own features that, when used intentionally, can help build trust.

Giving young people a space to interact with community leaders, and facilitating such gatherings to empower them to lead the conversation, can create a lasting and mutually beneficial feedback loop for newsrooms.

By connecting generations and harnessing history to tell the story of Baca County, the Plainsman Herald has found new revenue sources, partnerships with community and historical organizations and a path forward to serving its community.