Reaching younger audiences has long been a challenge for media organizations. As platforms evolve, trust in news shifts and news avoidance grows, it can feel especially difficult to connect with and serve multigenerational audiences in an authentic and sustainable way.
How can news leaders do their part to represent and include community perspectives from members of different age groups? The answers matter to democracy, and to the personal and collective challenges we face — those arising from loneliness and the lack of social connection brought about by the pandemic.
We heard many ways newsrooms are thinking about intergenerational problem-solving at our recent API Local News Summit on Civic Discourse Across Generations. We gathered news leaders in Denver who spoke with one another about collaborations with students they’ve spearheaded, ways their coverage both looks back and paves the way forward and how these efforts can strengthen civic engagement.
One theme that emerged was that experiments and targeted efforts to reach younger generations can be helpful as proof-of-concept, but making systemic changes — while necessary to be sustainable — can feel overwhelming.
That’s what publisher and CEO Vandana Kumar encountered when she took stock of India Currents, a publication founded almost 40 years ago to serve first-generation Indian audiences in the U.S. The children of those early readers — the so-called “1.5 generation” and second-gen Indian Americans — aren’t flipping through print magazines or even browsing static websites. They’re forming their identities through fast, visual and deeply personal media.
Their challenge was clear: India Currents could not thrive unless it bridged a 30-plus year-old magazine to 30-plus year-old next-gens in the diaspora. They began a transformation that wasn’t just about digital transition; it was about fostering a vibrant, cross-generational community that speaks in many voices, formats and languages — literal and cultural.
Kumar wrote for API about the concrete steps India Currents took to make the transformation that would prioritize generational solidarity. Below are some of the frameworks she used, which she learned about in the Media Transformation Challenge at the Poynter Institute. You can find her full essay here.
Share with your network
You also might be interested in:
We believe local news plays a critical role in cultivating local identity and civic engagement. But today’s youth need to be brought into a relationship with a local news institution just as they should be brought into and affirmed that they are active members of civic life today. That’s why we’ll convene our API Local News Summit on Youth Trust and Civic Resilience in March.
New year, same old meetings. Meetings that don’t include the right people or that include too many people. Meetings that could have been an email. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? As we kick off 2026, API wants to help you reset and rethink key meetings in your news organization.
As the American Press Institute marks 80 years, we’ll honor our legacy by continuing to respond to the evolving needs of news leaders. Our upcoming API Local News Summits will explore three critical places where democracy and sustainability intersect.
