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The American Press Institute is hosting a local summit on October 9-10 in Washington, D.C., to empower news leaders in enhancing residents’ leadership and influence over their community’s information ecosystem.

These partnerships can help rebuild trust in local media by including more voices and perspectives, and they offer a foundation for repair, restoration and reinvention. They weave the community together, fostering multidirectional conversations, a shared sense of place and joint ownership over our civic future.

We've asked five people outside of journalism with experience in engaging and working with people of all ages how they approach their work. What practices do they use to engage young people that news organizations can adapt and apply in broadening their audiences?

Here are a few ideas for activating your archives that participants brought to the recent API Summit on Local History, Community and Identity in Nashville — plus some ideas we all brought home to try out in the weeks and months to come.

Reaching people across age groups is a complex proposition for news leaders. It involves identifying issues and topics that resonate with all ages, creating content on multiple platforms, and finding ways for people to move past assumptions about one another. But the current moment in America demands this kind of work.

We should work to become trauma-informed news leaders — no matter where we sit in the shop — and be intentional to practice this when the stakes are lowest.

That opportunity to both deepen a community’s ties to its roots and find new ways to build revenue matters in today’s local news landscape -- and might be an opportunity for the effort to rally new philanthropic support for local news.

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.

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.