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At the API Local News Summit on Rural Journalism, Community and Sustainability in Tulsa, journalists noted one skill they had and could leverage more and one skill they needed to develop to be better conveners, facilitators and connectors. Four categories of skills stuck out that local journalists and news leaders need to better and more impactfully embrace these new roles.

By sending data from their targeted audiences in Adobe Analytics into MFN, Crain was able to more clearly understand what topics, categories, and even story types were engaging readers in key parts of their coverage area.

When we looked at the latest research on how Americans view news about elections, we noted several findings local media especially may want to use to start conversations about how they gain trust this year with their community.

Good convening requires strong facilitation skills, influential and empathic leadership skills, and different listening skills than an interview — things many journalists likely didn’t learn or anticipate when they signed up for the job. To be good conveners, local media need resources and opportunity to equip their journalists with these skills.

The urgency to establish more Spanish-language newsrooms or those dedicated to serving Hispanic communities cannot be overstated. We do not only need more hyper local journalism projects like ours, but we need more transparency and clarity with the existing media organizations.

In 2023, 13 news organizations were part of a cohort assembled by the American Press Institute to track the diversity of people quoted in their [...]

Call for applications is now closed. Americans use news and information to make decisions and thrive. But local news has other roles that complement gathering [...]

Experts define moral injury as the suffering that comes from witnessing, perpetrating or failing to prevent events that violate one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values. It is not classified as a mental illness, but it can lead to depression, substance abuse or burnout, which is one reason news managers need to understand the phenomenon of moral injury — and ways to address it or head it off.

Community listening is a crucial tenet of improving community engagement, along with asset mapping and collaborating with other local news outlets — all part of the API Inclusion Index cohort’s efforts toward better engaging communities of color.

We challenge local news organizations to smartly deploy their resources around the elections that most matter to their communities in 2024 — and also to think about how that energy builds to something more robust and sustained.