News Blog

Leaning into local identity and history can move our journalism from ‘we provide facts alone’ to ‘we provide facts and serve other important community functions.’

The American Press Institute is convening its second API Local News Summit of 2025, addressing a challenge shared by local and community-based media of all types.

In this self-reflective session — led by Sam Ragland, API’s vice president of journalism strategy — journalists will contribute anonymously to a series of prompts to learn actionable insights for reassessing and repairing their relationships with work.

Collaboration allows you to bring in more perspectives and ideas, making you better equipped to solve problems and take on bigger, more complex projects. Though the benefits are apparent, many teams and organizations need help with effective collaboration.

These programs, both evolutions of long-standing journalism industry efforts, reaffirm API’s commitment to fostering a more inclusive, transparent and accountable media landscape.

To truly prioritize audiences, your organization may need to change some of its most fundamental processes. How do you decide what is newsworthy? How do you keep your own biases in check during reporting and editing? How do you create journalism with — and not just for — your community?

At the American Press Institute, we believe the need for more engaged and informed communities will continue to grow. It’s why we focus on the role the press can play in community and civic life, and in facilitating discussions across communities with all of their varied voices and constituencies.

Table Stakes organizations of all media types found success by diversifying their revenue. They did this by developing strategies based on the audience funnel, moving from ad-supported journalism to subscriber- or member-supported journalism, and seeking philanthropic funding.

A culture of experimentation can also help more people feel invested in organizational success and foster innovation, as you have more people contributing their ideas.

As digital platforms and their users continue to grow and change, the ways news outlets build strategies around them will, too. These are themes we believe are key for digital transformation and sustaining and growing local news.