News Blog

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.

We’ve seen early wins: Our next-gen audience (ages 18–44) grew from 3,900 to 32,500 – a 733% growth in six months. If a small BIPOC-led newsroom like ours can reimagine itself as a dynamic cross-generational platform, others can too.

Reaching younger audiences has long been a challenge for media organizations. As platforms evolve, trust in news shifts and news avoidance grows, it can feel especially difficult to connect with and serve multigenerational audiences in an authentic and sustainable way. How can news leaders do their part to represent and include community perspectives from members of different age groups?

For us, we knew one of our biggest hurdles to success would be challenging the assumptions, both spoken and unspoken, we held for others. Here’s what we’ve learned over the past three years of gathering multigenerational problem-solvers.