News Blog

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.

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.