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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.

The cohort came to the in-person training session with enthusiasm and will to begin to make a change with how they best serve the communities they engage with and report on.

Journalism has the power to connect our communities, to bring out the best in what our society can be. Our goal is to help us all get there.