Series

We spoke with seven creators who have worked with both local and national newsrooms, and two who were hired to create content for social media sites. One theme came through clearly: successful newsroom-creator partnerships depend on mutual trust, creative freedom and a shared respect for how audiences connect online.

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.

We’ve seen students become more confident and eager to get involved in their communities when we provide nonpartisan information that equips students for conversations with local officials and createe the space for them to connect with those local leaders.

When we began asking what kind of stories still mattered to Baca County, we realized many of them weren’t “breaking news” but generational memory. And the paper was the last remaining platform that treated those memories with care and context.

The methods that worked for Boyle Heights Beat may not work the exact same way in every neighborhood, but we know that trust begins with community listening and authentic engagement, and that’s true everywhere. We are building a framework that relies on partnerships, mentorship and genuine care.

Today, we’re undergoing a bold transformation — reimagining ourselves as a platform that fosters generational solidarity and serves bicultural audiences from Gen Z to Boomers.

Generational tension has always existed, of course, but today it is amplified by several factors, both in our communities and our newsrooms. We asked five summit participants to share more about the ways they are engaging and serving multigenerational audiences.

The event was joyous, eclectic and completely unlike what you might expect from a journalism organization. But according to the team that produced it, this is what local media can and should look like.

Although our foundation supports multiple newsrooms, it is easy to envision a single local newsroom that offers subscriptions or paid memberships executing a similar partnership with one or more local history groups.

Our acute understanding of readers’ affinity for their neighborhoods inspired our most successful promotional campaign, now an annual tradition that typically drives up to a quarter of our annual subscription revenue per year.