Special Edition

While the newsroom can hold a unique position as convener and connector, this function goes beyond the newsroom to support healthy, thriving communities and neighborhoods.

Because these types of committees are organized by and for news organizations, community member participants require extra support and advocacy to ensure the experience is beneficial for them, too.

Rather than a committee that simply listened to the concerns of newsrooms, we created one that empowered community members to influence and impact the work of these newsrooms.

Steps news organizations can take to set up their own community advisory committees based on lessons from the Pittsburgh Inclusion Index cohort.

Collaboration allows you to bring in more perspectives and ideas, making you better equipped to solve problems and take on bigger, more complex projects. Though the benefits are apparent, many teams and organizations need help with effective collaboration.

To truly prioritize audiences, your organization may need to change some of its most fundamental processes. How do you decide what is newsworthy? How do you keep your own biases in check during reporting and editing? How do you create journalism with — and not just for — your community?

Table Stakes organizations of all media types found success by diversifying their revenue. They did this by developing strategies based on the audience funnel, moving from ad-supported journalism to subscriber- or member-supported journalism, and seeking philanthropic funding.

A culture of experimentation can also help more people feel invested in organizational success and foster innovation, as you have more people contributing their ideas.

As digital platforms and their users continue to grow and change, the ways news outlets build strategies around them will, too. These are themes we believe are key for digital transformation and sustaining and growing local news.

Once API’s influencer cohort ended their experiments last fall, they were encouraged to expand their retrospective beyond assessing what worked and what didn’t, instead considering value creation questions.