Influencer collaborations: Lessons from four months of local news experiments

The American Press Institute has begun publishing takeaways from a new program to help local media collaborate with trusted messengers and influencers. In the coming weeks, we’ll share more from participants. We’ll also share new resources, informed by the cohort and others, to help local news leaders explore this work in their community. Sign up to receive updates when we share more findings from this initiative.

 

“If I knew then that not every influencer views themselves as an influencer, I’d approach them differently with more structure and different terminology.”

That’s just one of dozens of madlibs, insights and epiphanies collected during the Election + Influencer Learning Cohort supported by the American Press Institute and the Knight Election Hub. After four months of non-partisan, election-based influencer collaborations, the cohort concluded in January.

Our participating newsrooms represented diverse communities and media types — PublicSource (Pennsylvania), Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Georgia), THE CITY (New York), WSOC-TV (North Carolina), Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service (Wisconsin), and Factchequeado (nationwide). And they pursued different types of collaborations and goals.

Their shared curiosity and spirit of continuous learning will now support so many more news organizations than were present in this brief cohort. We’re beginning to publish insights, templates and takeaways to support community-engaged journalists and capacity-building trust initiatives.

Since we know hindsight is 20/20, we launched our final cohort learning call in January with a madlib: When it comes to influencers, if I knew then that [observation, hurdle, surprise]… I’d do [this specific thing] differently. Each response is a nugget worth considering before you launch into your own influencer collaborations.

• If I knew then how important it was for the influencer to align with the purpose of your organization, I’d have conducted a more tailored search for the right influencer.
• If I knew then that people don’t follow the same timelines or sense of urgency that you do… I’d have set VERY early deadlines for them.
• If I knew then that influencer reach is as random and erratic as legacy news org social reach… I’d form this as more of an experiment and diversify both influencer and topic area differently.

As research and reporting continue to inform this slice of the news industry, we’ll continue learning, too. Who gets to be called a journalist in 2025? What is the future of trustworthy information, especially considering the access to and trust for online content creators? How might journalism adapt to the rise, or co-opt the styles, of news influencers?

When it comes to questions related to collaboration with influencers, we understand a few things more clearly that should inform other projects and experiments like this.

Influencers are still beholden to the algorithm, so do your research and manage your expectations.

It can be easy to play a quick round of pin the tail on the influencer based on follower count or post likes and comments. The higher the number, the better to work with, right? Not exactly. Take the time to evaluate your influencer landscape, to follow them and engage with their content, to listen for their values — especially those that align or mirror your news values — or even to invite them into your newsroom. There are things to do before contract and project discussions.

Interrogate the influencer platform the same way you would a news story. What is their average reach? Where do they get the highest quality engagement? What is their video dropoff rate? Knowing their data, how might the influencer define the success of this kind of collaboration, and how does that definition differ from yours?

Temper your expectations by reminding yourself of the engagement funnel.

Collaborating with trusted community messengers is a deeper engagement play than the “top of funnel” touchpoint. We’re used to thinking about the latter in our social distribution strategies. But in collaborating with an influencer, the trust has already been earned, the exposure to the content has been chosen (thank you, follower button). And so, part of managing your expectations and senior leaders in your shop is to keep “quality over quantity” at the top of your mind.

Not all influencers see themselves as such, so adjust your language and outreach accordingly.

There’s a lot of language floating around these days related to this topic. Are these folks influencers, creators or trusted messengers?

If you expand your scope down the lane of community engagement, you may add community liaison or advocate to this list. And if you expand to digital marketing, you’d use descriptors based on follower count, naming them mega, macro, micro, nano, mid-tier or expert influencers.

The name or label we recommend? Depends more on the person than the goal of your collaboration.

Our cohort found that some community members didn’t label themselves as creators or influencers and, in fact, found that reference to them or their work was a bit jarring. We wondered how the idea of “influencer” hit beyond the news bubble we’re all in. What assumptions or feelings might our collaborators be bringing into this work, and how do we ensure both relationships and trust through the language we choose?

Even for those who see themselves as influencers, how might the language we choose help onboard them to the project? Might reminding an influencer that they, too, are a trusted messenger for a distinct community affect the storyboard, the messaging and the project’s tone? Might it further invite them into the mission and service of journalism in a way that is surprising and nourishing to the community they’ve built?

Influencers value thought partnership, so don’t abdicate your editorial responsibility, creativity or institutional knowledge.

Collaborating offers opportunities to loosen up and experiment with new formats. Is your newsroom’s idea of what something should look like accelerating the work, slowing it down, or full-on derailing it? Some in the cohort noted that “this is going better” when the creator or community member offered what they wanted to do.

Others in the cohort found their trusted messenger wanting to use the technical skills of the newsroom to make this content pop off their social feeds. Meeting in the middle was helpful and a teaching moment.

A ripple from this middle included mutual appreciation and trust — as all good collaborations should aim to do. Some in our cohort talked about how the person they collaborated with for a focused project began sharing their work more generally, on their own, after the fact. The time spent collaborating and building the relationship can open more lines of trust and communication.

Again, collaborating with trusted messengers, especially those who are online, is a next-level community engagement opportunity — whether the content amplifies your reporting or adds to it through your collaborator’s lived experiences and connections.

Be open to the “one size does not fit all” approach.

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We can expect other learning cohorts to pop up and to engage in this real-time pivot, like the Going Solo: Journalism Creator Workshop and Building the Brand Through Influencer Marketing.

At API, we are most interested in influencer partnerships or collaborations as a way to deepen community engagement practices and increase organizational capacity. We are not out to chase illusive virality. This is why we often replace “influencer” in our own language with “trusted messenger” — the latter extending beyond the confines of a social feed and follower count and into our real lives and neighborhoods.

Along the way, we look forward to pressure-testing our research on philanthropy used to reimagine opinion journalism, which is a bright spot for us. We anticipate exploring philanthropy as a revenue opportunity to support the trust-building and engagement of news organizations collaborating with influencers.

And we remain committed to these questions as 2025 gets going:

• What more can we learn about how these collaborations improve sustainability of local media for the long haul? And how do we reconcile information living on influencer platforms, especially on social media, instead of always pushing to our websites?
• Likewise, how might these collaborations contribute to a more diverse local news landscape and the sustainability of those independent creators within it?
• How can collaborations evolve to benefit the local media ecosystem, strengthening the skills and ties between people who care deeply about improving their community, journalists, residents — everyone?
• What is the difference between content creators and creator journalism, and how might that difference inform these partnerships and further diversify the local news ecosystem?
• What are the community payoffs that we can measure, especially as they relate to increases in social capital, human capital, social cohesion or even depolarization?

If you are interested in helping your news organization embrace collaborations such as these, please contact us to hear how we might help. And if you are interested in partnering or financially supporting such efforts to help local news increase social trust and social connection while decreasing polarization through active partnerships with trusted messengers, please let us know that, too.