Americans face increasing news fatigue and dissatisfaction with national politics.

But they often love and value the community they live in— and that offers opportunities for local media to embrace their geography and history in new ways.

You can feel it in the naming of newer outlets. When Philadelphia’s Billy Penn started (now 10 years ago), the name pointed to the famous Founding Father whose statue sits iconically atop City Hall. Independent publication The Green Line in Toronto refers to the metro rail that connects east and west parts of the city, and “symbolizes real, everyday people in Toronto.” In the American Press Institute’s home in Virginia, Cardinal News evokes the commonwealth’s state bird.

But you can also feel it in what local journalism does for community. The things national news can’t. 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 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 make decisions and improve your life. When they help you feel like you belong.

Reporting is one route to those ends. But there are other ways local media have long helped engender a “local identity.” Guides on your area’s cultural food or music, obituaries and other efforts that reminisce and honor the past, collaborations with local businesses that benefit the community writ large, events that celebrate community accomplishment, and convening more broadly can all accomplish this. Local outlets, arguably powered by community members who happen to be journalists, contribute to a community’s well-being — and demonstrate they, like you, are part of a particular place.

Moreover, speaking to and even encouraging local identity might be a way to draw people to pay for or donate to news. As new research notes, “community attachment” plays a vital role in what motivates someone to pay for local news.  Perhaps that’s why Block Club Chicago, which emphasizes neighborhoods in its coverage, “smashed” its end-of-year subscription goals when it gave new subscribers a free neighborhood print. Or why The Green Line, which weaves local community markers into membership tiers, has grown. Or why The Keene Sentinel increased retention when it paired subscriptions with coffee from a local business.

The embrace of local identity leads to 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
  • WCPO published a children’s book about a beloved Cincinnati Zoo hippo (Fiona), which received sponsorship and then brought donations to the Zoo
  • 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 the aforementioned 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

Embracing local history can take this further. We know that on its own, as a Bloomberg headline put it, “the business of history is booming.” Communities are growing around podcasts and creators of many kinds. And the data on book sales in the U.S. might feel relevant: “For the first time in an election year, history as a category outsold politics (by two to one).”

Here, local news has a great opportunity. As stewards of the “first draft of history” in their community — and sometimes sitting on archives of historical significance as a result — news organizations and history can be a natural fit. You see the revenue potential, too, when:

What better time than now is there to experiment with local identity and history? As 2025 begins, the conditions are there.

Of course, this is not without challenges. Engaging the past is not a walk in the park, especially when parts of that history may be challenging or dark. As an expert in the science of nostalgia, Andrew Abeyta explained to journalists after an API Local News Summit small group last year: What is nostalgic for one community group can be traumatic and harmful to another. When considering how you might embrace your community history, you must go beyond the best practices of community engagement and learn about regenerative and restorative engagement.

Building local identity in an inclusive way needs care, too. Both news leaders in charge of these projects and those responsible for the business would benefit from a range of skills — mediation and reconciliation, facilitation, and an understanding of social psychology, sociology and other relevant fields, in addition to learning from peers’ failures. 

Think, though, of the payoff. Local media outlets looking for stability can benefit from initiatives that help them attract and retain paying audiences or donors. These efforts may also reveal new opportunities for securing sponsorships, grants and advertising from institutions and businesses that don’t want to align their brand or mission to the perception of news as predominantly negative. For our civic health, it might bind communities together and enable them to imagine better futures — and all as we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

At the American Press Institute, we are diving in. We will devote our first API Local News Summit of 2025 to the theme of Local Identity, History and Sustainability. We hope to enable experiments on the theme — be they news organization-led podcasts, newsletters, in-person convenings or artificial intelligence-based projects. We plan to share successes as well as sorrows, including through BetterNews.org, our case study site. And we know what we learn will enhance broader work this year on civic discourse across difference and news, as we seek to help news leaders engage communities across generations and embrace collaborations with influencers and creators.

If you are interested in helping your news organization explore how local identity and history can enhance revenue generation at your organization, please contact us to learn how we might help or sign up to get updates about summits. And if you are interested in partnering or financially supporting such efforts to help local news contribute to the well-being of their communities in this way, please email Kevin Loker at funding@pressinstitute.org.

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