Local journalism helps people make decisions and thrive, but it’s not just facts and figures that make that happen. Local news organizations create value through a range of ways they can help you engage and grow where you live — when they inspire affection or duty to your neighbor, when they help you form social bonds, when they enable you to take action to improve the community you call home. When they help you feel like you belong.
Driven by these functions of journalism, the American Press Institute will host our next API Local News Summit on how local and community-based media might engender a local identity and embrace their geography and history. We’ll help news leaders consider how they contribute to a community’s well-being by fostering a sense of place — and how, when done with care, this might offer new ways to sustain local news.
Request to attend the API Local News Summit on Local Identity, History and Sustainability
The API Local News Summit on Local Identity, History and Sustainability is invitation-based, but we want to grow this network of news leaders tapping into local identity and place to improve their journalism and business outcomes. Many work in different mediums or silos, unaware of others who are experimenting with products and experiences that touch this theme — creative subscription appeals, new newsletters, podcasts, in-person events, merchandise, archive-based projects and even historical tours.
If you have ideas about how news leaders can consider the bonds that tie communities together and what community partnerships and local identities go untapped — and especially if you are working on this yourself — we’d like to extend this call for participation in our summit.
The API Local News Summit on Local Identity, History and Sustainability summit will gather approximately 60 media leaders and non-journalism experts in Nashville on April 8-9. It is specifically designed to help news leaders create value for their community by embracing geography and history in new ways.
We are open to people with various responsibilities and titles from commercial and nonprofit media of all platforms: newspapers, independent online publishers, nonprofit news sites, public media, TV, newsletter hosts and other culture-pushing community managers. We believe the local and community news industry deserves a community of practice across media types, united in the belief that the press can push back against news fatigue by emphasizing community identity, history and belonging.
As new research notes, “community attachment” plays a vital role in what motivates someone to pay for local news.
And around the country, API’s partner news organizations have embraced local identity and found other business results, too:
- Vermont Public collaborated with a local brewery for a new brew based on its Brave Little State podcast, resulting in new sponsorship dollars and members to the station
- The Sacramento Bee published a regional cookbook that deepened relationships with local restaurants and chefs and nets new revenue
- Student publications The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina and The Chronicle at Duke leaned upon a longtime basketball rivalry to collaborate and raise $55,000 and secure new donors
- Publications like Canopy Atlanta and Block Club Chicago are finding a market opportunity with a neighborhood-by-neighborhood model
- The Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormonland, focused on a topic very relevant to the local community, grew national readership and Patreon donations from across the country
Our partner organizations, as stewards of the “first draft of history” in their community, have found success embracing history too:
- Newsday turns to nostalgia and evergreen content to drive new subscriptions, one of the highest-rated topics to do so newsroom-wide
- Las Vegas Review-Journal uses its archives and community partnerships to retell stories for a new platform, audio, resulting in hundreds of thousands of downloads and new sponsors for the outlet
- Osage News and KOSU organize a bus tour to tell the story of the Osage Reign of Terror, drawing attention from funders and showing a path to future events work
- Cardinal News begins an email newsletter focused on Virginia history, specifically its role in the nation’s 250th anniversary, supported financially by the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission
If these or similar efforts speak to you or describe your work, please consider this opportunity.
Request an invitation for the remaining spots at our summit via this form by Tuesday, Feb. 25, at 11:59 p.m. ET. API has a limited amount of travel funds to help offset participation costs, allowing those invited to request up to $750 to cover travel and lodging.
In the coming months, expect more from API on local identity and history via our Need to Know newsletter and our website.
Sponsors or funders help make API Local News Summits accessible and equitable and enable insights to extend beyond the summit room. For this event, we are grateful for support from The Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, Report for America and Tennessee Press Association. If you’re also interested in supporting this summit or API’s wider focus on Revenue and Resilience, please email funding@pressinstitute.org.
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