If a good newspaper, as the playwright Arthur Miller said, is a “nation talking to itself,” then it follows that a good local news organization must be a town, or a community, doing the same thing.
But those conversations are quite different today than when Miller made this observation more than six decades ago. And journalists’ role in the discussion has changed amid a splintered media environment, political polarization, economic uncertainty and a national epidemic of loneliness.
At the American Press Institute, we believe the need for more engaged and informed communities will continue to grow. It’s why we focus on the role the press can play in community and civic life, and in facilitating discussions across communities with all of their varied voices and constituencies.
Age is one of the lines of difference we want to help bridge. Generational tension has always existed, of course, but today it is amplified by several factors, both in our communities and our newsrooms.
So often, news organizations focus their efforts on appealing to one segment of the community, younger audiences or older ones, but might there be a missed opportunity? What about putting different generations in direct conversation with each other? Or centering their similarities instead of their differences? What happens when news organizations see themselves as more than information providers but as conveners and connectors, making fostering dialogue across generations a core tenet of their editorial strategy? What happens when an editorial strategy puts generations shoulder to shoulder and reaches toward the root of a community’s problems? Might we enable stronger solutions across lived and life experiences?
Local media can emphasize civic discourse across generations in many ways. In recent years, we’ve seen strong examples of news organizations that pursue:
- Events that bridge generations for local conversation, such as Mississippi Free Press’s Solution Circles or 9 Millones’ memory circles
- Community listening that surfaces common threads across generations, such as Haitian Times’ “Voices of the Haitian Diaspora” project, built with Cortico
- Frames for engagement that naturally welcome exchange across generations, such as the Bowling Green Daily News’ involvement in “What Could BG Be?” (which also included work with student journalists)
- Intentional outreach and collaboration with older or younger community members, such as Baltimore Beat’s youth voter guide or BenitoLink’s listening sessions with various groups, including seniors
- Reporting beats that incorporate growing up or aging and offer room for community engagement, such as Sarasota Herald Tribune’s “aspirations journalism” project on age-friendly communities or The Sumter Item’s “Next Generation” initiative
- Digital and multimedia engagement that can foster or curate conversation across generations such as Verite News’ “Porch Poppin’,” which involves video and trusted messengers
Such intentional cross-generational projects can uplift the people in our communities at a time when our society is struggling with myriad issues. Our neighborhoods — and the news organizations that serve them — need intergenerational unity to face today’s challenges, not just because division distracts us from solutions but because generations can learn from one another.
Engaging across divides can bring clarity to one’s beliefs and even help them evolve. At API, we closely follow lessons from social psychology, pluralism and other fields that journalists too often miss. What we have found is that community-engaged local news organizations are points of light in our tense and divided world. They have taken up the role of bridge-builder and are modeling a culture of pluralism that all our communities deserve through a variety of tactics: community listening, asset mapping, hero-to-host leadership and complicating the narrative. This approach displays humility, offers belonging, shows respect and empathy, models intergroup contact and sees diversity as a strength.
To that end, one goal of our work this year is to supply news organizations with new ways to think and talk about how to solve problems across generations — both within their communities and in their newsrooms. We want to help them with strategies, insights and tools to facilitate conversations that help people of different ages understand one another, work together for common cause and avoid misunderstanding.
The internal and external challenges are not separate; they are intertwined: A newsroom that skews toward one generation will certainly imagine audience needs differently from one dominated by a different age cohort. And for those that do have age diversity, they still need work cultures and teams that instill psychological safety — where members of each generation feel they are an integral contributor. It all impacts news organizations’ ability to attract and retain audiences — and talent — of all ages.
Our second Local News Summit of the year is one place where we will focus on these opportunities with candor and care. It follows an in-depth conversation on local news, identity and the histories of our communities that we recently hosted in Nashville, which has primed us to discuss civic discourse across generations at our Local News Summit in Denver in June.
Our conversation will be informed by our ongoing work with news organizations and survey data we’ve collected about how people of various ages get and pay for news. The summit will draw from newsrooms’ experiments in reaching across generations, such as with trusted messengers. And we will round out the conversation by tapping expertise outside journalism, such as nonprofit leaders who cultivate intergenerational connection daily and researchers who have studied age diversity and why the current “five-generation” workforce can be an advantage rather than a liability.
This generational bridging can be beneficial to everyone involved. The more we engage alongside different perspectives, the less “threatening” those perspectives seem. And having deliberative and generative contact across generations can transform how we see ourselves in community — and how we see others as community.
You might also be interested in:
We’ve gathered reflections from researchers in social science who have attended recent API Local News Summits, where they had the chance to interact with and explore how their work helps — and can be improved by insights from — local journalism.
The press will be much more effective in serving people and strengthening democracy if it learns from what researchers are learning. Among the examples and takeaways, you will find that news leaders and non-news experts alike value the opportunity to think differently about the challenges in front of them, about how local news can change and how research can ask different questions.
We'll share some of the resources, tools and lessons learned from our training sessions and research help desk. We hope you can use these as you plan your continuing accountability coverage and start thinking about the next election on the horizon.
