News Blog

In the API Learning Cohort, and from our own conversations and research, we realized one of the most important decisions you’ll make is choosing who to partner with. Here are some things to consider.

The Houston Chronicle created small-scale experiments that tested how strategically work with a creator while navigating potentially thorny issues around ethics, control and impact. In this series, they walk you through what they did.

Although we caution against relying solely on financial conversion metrics to measure the success of partnering with a creator, setting a secondary goal can be beneficial — especially when you’ve defined, or redefined, conversion for a creator-newsroom collaboration.

Every community has a commons — a park, a library, a garden — a shared space that only thrives when people care for it together. Our local information ecosystems are no different. At our recent Local News Summit, we asked the room: What does it mean to be gardeners, guards and stewards of the local information commons?

You don’t need a product team or a new budget line to get started. You need one mindset shift, one outcome metric and one protected hour per week to make it happen.

We know psychological safety might feel like a ‘nice to have,’ but what if the failure to create that safety is silently stalling your best ideas and alienating your next generation of leaders?

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.