How API Local News Summits help news leaders and non-news experts collaborate on solutions

The American Press Institute will soon complete a yearlong project to outline opportunities to improve local journalism and limit polarization — specifically by enabling news leaders and non-news experts to inform each other’s work. The project expands on one of API’s own commitments: to tap ideas and research from outside of journalism to find new solutions to industry challenges. Below is an excerpt about how we create the environment for news leaders and non-news experts to exchange ideas at API Local News Summits.

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Adults learn differently than children, an essential point for anyone designing experiences to help advance journalism.

We have words for this: pedagogy, the teaching of children, which many know, and andragogy, the teaching of adults.

Research on andragogy can help design experiences for advancing thinking in any field, including journalism. It shows that adults come into any opportunity to learn with more awareness of the world around them. They have rich experiences to draw upon — but they need to be ready to learn. They need to be motivated to do so and to know how new information will help them. Further, adults do best when their learning is challenge-focused — when they bring their issue or problem into the experience.

At the American Press Institute, we think about this for our programming for news leaders. That includes API Local News Summits. Each year, we host three of these highly participatory, invitation-based events for approximately 60 people. They’re designed to provide a welcoming and collaborative space for media leaders to think boldly about the role of the free press in the future of our communities.

Our summits are challenge-focused. Rather than an open conference program tied by the bonds of the people attending, we bring together a diverse range of news leaders from different mediums and business models to work through a shared challenge. Invitees are facing the challenge in some way and trying to address it. They attend with a sense of how the two-day experience will help them when they return to their organizations. Recent summits have focused on creating collaboration and belonging across teams, evolving how election coverage flows into year-round coverage and embracing the role of convener.

Another mark of these summits is the expertise from outside of journalism. Each summit’s 60 participants include seven to eight “non-news experts” — civil society leaders, artists and, often, researchers. These non-news experts share their insights to help news leaders on their challenge; the experts also gain ideas for further research and potential collaboration. They are an important element of these summits, though they are not the sole reason people attend.

We’ve been evaluating how we make this work at our summits, where the interaction between news leaders and non-news experts is a top-rated attribute. We held three summits in 2024; 4 out of 5 surveyed participants across summits noted these sessions as helpful and/or enlightening. And when it came to the topic of elections, where bridging was already on their minds, the response was even more positive. Some 95% selected it as helpful and/or enlightening.

One participant sums up a theme we often hear: “The overviews and meetings with the non-news leaders were terrific,” this person said. “We all suffer from some amount of ‘group think,’ so whenever I can hear from folks who appreciate what we do as journalists, but can give us feedback on how to do it more effectively, I’m game.”

We strive to improve our model and share what we are learning with others.

Here are some things we do that we think work:

• The challenge is the event focus, not specifically learning from experts. Each way journalists might learn from researchers can have a place — and we believe reinforces the others — but we find news leaders crave deep discussions with thoughtful peers about one challenge at a time. The focused headspace of an intentional two days away allows time for conversation between peer news leaders and the non-news experts, in a context not driving toward a story quote. Moreover, it attracts people who are ready to learn and who have their own challenges, allowing them to bring meaningful ideas and connections back to their news organization.
  
• Attendance is small and curated. The challenge drives the right list of attendees. When the challenge is narrowed, you as an organizer prioritize your outreach — and you create a context where each interaction someone has while attending can be of high value. Attendees can count on meeting people working on a similar issue, with similar influence in their organization — boundaries that also help the non-news experts focus what they share.
  
• Expert inclusion is based on news leader needs and knowledge gaps. In addition to curating the room based on the challenge, we inform the agenda of these programs with insight from the news leader participants. API staff conduct stakeholder interviews with many participants on key questions about the challenge at hand, the answers of which shape a pre-event survey that all participants complete. The learnings from that process shape the final program. The conversations also reveal the gaps news leaders have, suggesting what kind of expertise will most benefit participants.
• Most of the event is shoulder-to-shoulder, news leaders and non-news experts as equals. Aligned with insight from intergroup contact elsewhere, these events limit distinctions between news leaders and non-news expert attendees. Everyone walks in the same and completes Day One activities and reflections together, talking in small pairs and groups, no matter the person’s background.
• We change the orientation after everyone is comfortable. It isn’t until Day Two that we draw lines. We host non-news expert-led small groups in the morning. This timing means many people have shared meals together or talked with one another either in a programmed exercise or the unstructured time around it. They’ve also all shared the summit experience so far.
• We prompt news leaders to reflect.  After the small groups, we ask news leaders to reflect on their conversations and write down ideas they can bring back to their news organizations. The exercise helps the individual reflect, though we also place the anonymous reflections up for everyone to read — and to see the scale of learning possible together.

Here are some things we’re learning:

• People want more opportunities to engage during the events. Once they’re in small groups together, most participants want to keep going. We’ve learned in the past year and a half that one round where participants can choose from about seven non-news expert-led small groups is not enough. We’ve increased them to two rounds (each 45 to 55 minutes). This allows news leaders to participate in more than one non-news conversation.
• It helps to prep non-news experts for these conversations about journalism. It is not common in academia or civil society to enter into collaborative conversations with journalists about the role of the free press in one’s community. Over time, we have worked on prepping non-news attendees for our small group formats using a Google Form that helps them outline what they will share through focused prompts about the topic and their work. After they submit, we offer feedback on what may or may not resonate with journalists and to provide insight into what is happening in the current news innovation landscape.
  
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  A portion of the form API shares with non-news experts.

  Focusing on key points keeps conversations productive — and a researcher’s prep light. While we put time into preparation, we keep the format of the small groups themselves relatively loose. Non-news experts are asked to share focused findings or examples for five to 10 minutes and to enumerate their ideas. From there, we want them to spend the rest of the time following the interests of the group, which number from seven to 10 people.
  

• We can be even more mindful of the non-news experts’ experience, even as we focus first on the news leaders.  API’s core audience is news leaders, but we know we can still become more inclusive in how we instruct non-news experts to participate in activities that are mostly geared toward news leader participants. Some non-news experts like participating in these exercises from their own vantage point; others have liked imagining what they would do as a news leader; some have opted not to participate as much but to listen.
• The interest in learning from non-news insights continues afterward. We gather summit participants for a virtual “reunion” about three months after an event. Participants have valued repeating the non-news small group activities online — but we think it works best then because the bonds have been built. We have tried to feature non-news small group discussions as an optional session in a virtual program with limited success. As a result, we believe the in-person nature of our summits is an important differentiator for our own future programming. We know, too, that participants embrace the opportunity to engage each other beyond the follow-up events we organize. For example, after our election-focused summit, the Detroit Free Press invited University of Michigan political scientist Yanna Krupnikov to speak with staff.
• Politics isn’t the only way to gain insights that bridge differences and reduce polarization. We found an appetite for non-news small groups focused on bridging and depolarization at a summit for rural-serving news organizations. The interest mirrored when we wove this into a summit of politics editors at an election-focused gathering. This suggests that interesting work can be done in depolarization and journalism in spaces that aren’t first organized around it or have the obvious tie.

We’ll continue to iterate on the API Local News Summits, striving for excellence and for insights others can learn from. We are also keenly interested in what factors outside of the events themselves might help create more fruitful exchanges like this, whether organized by API or others.

Further, we know that getting it right is its own learning opportunity. When we, as a journalism support organization, model facilitation and event design that builds bridges and creates fruitful exchange among different types of people, news leaders can follow. News leaders, increasingly conveners themselves, can bring their API experience back to their organization and elevate their offerings for their community.

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This project was made possible through the support of a grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation (funder DOI 501100011730) to better understand how local news leaders and researchers can learn from the other to improve local journalism and limit polarization in their communities (TWCF-2023-32603). The opinions expressed in this report and its excerpt are those of the organizer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.