Local news is essential to civic discourse — and its future depends on proving it 


Healthy civic discourse requires more than people having opinions in public. It begins with a community’s ability to hear more of itself — more voices, more questions, more lived experiences. And it demands more meaningful ways for people, across differences, to participate in debates and decisions that shape daily life.

Local news plays an important part in making this possible. While individuals and self-organizing groups play a role in today’s information landscape, local news organizations as institutions remain influential. They bridge. They set norms. They celebrate and honor. They also provide on-ramps to civic membership — a “deep belonging” that helps people “feel responsible for honoring [a community’s] past, stewarding its present and co-creating its future,” as civic practitioners Sam Pressler and Pete Davis have put it.

But the signs that local news organizations add this value to community life — that they make civic conversation and decision-making better — are often subtle. These civic signals often show up in community actions and behaviors: repeat participation, increased questions and/or comments, public use of the journalism and community-led initiatives spurred by reporting.

Research from API and others suggests that many of these same behaviors — participating, contributing, sharing, returning — are associated with a greater likelihood to support news financially. In other words, they reflect the kinds of relationships to news and information that lead people, especially Millennials and Gen Z — who are also more likely to engage with information from trusted messengers and digital creators — to support and invest in it.

Moreover, these signals add up to something deeper: the strength of the relationship between a newsroom and the community. Though difficult to see and at times more difficult to measure, these and similar behaviors determine whether a news organization becomes essential to the community it serves. And they tell an important story — especially if we’re asking a different question.

What if journalism’s value is not exclusively in information?

The primary purpose of journalism, especially as a service-based field, is to help people make decisions and thrive. To enable freedom and self-governing.

If this is true, we must adapt how we define and measure the success of our journalism.

As local news organizations contract in some places and expand in others, the threefold challenge for leaders is:

• Learning how their presence — in addition to their reporting — activates civic signals
• Finding the balance between legacy success metrics and relationship strength as impact
• Using those signals to understand and communicate their role in a healthier local information landscape

Local news leaders can build their own impact examples, peer knowledge and insights from other fields

Busy news leaders know that reach is an important indicator, and they often orient toward it. They also know, often intuitively, the civic value of their work. Reporters have stories of how their coverage influenced public debate, how a thank-you email revealed someone took action or how a neighborhood changed over time after sustained attention.

These are often treated as anecdotes. But they’re also signals — observable, repeatable signs of how journalism is shaping civic life.

The challenge is not that impact is absent. It’s that it is rarely defined, collected or communicated in ways that make local journalism more visible and even critical to a community. Newsrooms may see these moments in passing; they even collect them in internal dashboards. But do they have the space and shared frameworks to maximize how they use these signals as data?

In a people-first news organization, this kind of data can serve multiple purposes. Internally, it can help teams understand what is resonating and where relationships are deepening. Externally, it can help communities see themselves in the work and understand the role journalism plays in their lives. This data can also inform how a community’s civic signals support a news organization’s expansion.

But it’s easier to measure reach than belonging. Traffic may rise, audiences may come — and we’ve all seen how both can also go. Subscriber counts, scroll depth, and impressions are straightforward to track. The stickiness of how quality journalism follows people in daily life — into conversations at the dinner table, into jury duty, into the voting booth or the block party —is harder but no less real.

In this age of AI-supported journalism and AI-overwhelmed social feeds, the American Press Institute’s second local news summit of the year will create space to interrogate how our journalism is taking root. Are new communities seeing themselves in coverage? Are their voices shaping it? Is local journalism enabling a stronger civic conversation because our news, our reporters, our presence is there, actively in the mix of day-to-day life? And are these factors clear and valuable enough to residents that they will financially support it to keep from losing it altogether?

We know local media across the country are already doing work that strengthens civic discourse in these ways. From what we see, the field is further along in generating civic impact than it is in measuring it.

The bright spots below show signals more of us can pay attention to and amplify. While they don’t represent formal measurement systems, they do surface something equally important: the kinds of behaviors and relationships that signal civic impact — participation, contribution, connection and action.

Our opportunity here is to better name the signals, track them thoughtfully and find ways to use them internally and externally to advance local journalism.

We see opportunity to better measure and communicate impact when:

1. Honolulu Civil Beat combines accountability reporting with community conversations and local civic engagement (Signal: accountability + civic awareness)
2. CivicLex hosts civic workshops and community conversations that help residents understand and participate in local government (Signal: civic participation + civic literacy)
3. CalMatters builds tools like Digital Democracy to make legislative activity more transparent and accessible, helping residents better understand and engage with state decision-making (Signal: civic transparency + informed participation)
4. Kansas City Defender centers reporting on community-defined priorities, often distributed through social platforms embedded in local culture (Signal: representation + community-led agenda)
5. The Pittsburgh local news ecosystem, including PublicSource, WESA and TribLive, partners with the Pittsburgh News Advisory Group to bring community voices into shared coverage priorities (Signal: shared governance + community-informed ecosystem)
6. Baltimore Beat experiments with pay-what-you-can classifieds to surface local businesses that residents want to find outside algorithm-driven systems (Signal: local economic connection + community infrastructure)
7. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Neighborhood Dispatch embeds reporters in neighborhoods, where journalism moves beyond observation to participation — helping catalyze local action and collaboration (Signal: embedded reporting + community action)
8. The Boston Globe’s B-Side creates spaces and experiences that complement its journalism and foster connection among younger audiences (Signal: belonging + social connection)

Across these examples, we begin to see patterns: people returning, contributing, sharing, connecting, acting in response to journalism. And this makes it clear that there is no single model to follow. Instead, there are many ways to build — and measure — the civic impact of local journalism.

Advancing measurement, however, requires an interdisciplinary approach. While research outside journalism explores social connection, trust and belonging, which can enhance community well-being, it may be overlooked by news leaders. Still, it is essential for understanding the broader social context of local news and its effects on communities.

For example, outside of news, efforts exist to:

• Measure local belonging, such as through the Belonging Barometer, and explore this fundamental human need’s connection to civic functions
• Score the language of how we disagree, as done by the Dignity Index, to ease divisions by monitoring how people treat one another
• Follow democratic attitudes, like CIRCLE’s monitoring of young people’s views toward our country’s forms of government
• Understand feelings of agency, such as measured by Human Flourishing Lab, to see if people feel they can take action that benefits them and others
• Monitor real and perceived economic mobility, such as through the Upward Mobility Framework, to assess the opportunities people can pursue to improve their lives

Local news and information may affect these and other measures, all of which are themselves ingredients in healthy civic discourse and communities.

The API summit will provide us with an opportunity to pause, reflect, and strengthen our efforts within an interdisciplinary group. These efforts are important for news organizations and the communities they serve. They are particularly significant for news organizations that are deeply committed to their local areas, as these organizations need to use their data more efficiently. This is especially relevant for news organizations expanding into new neighborhoods, counties, and other regions, as tracking their success from the outset is essential.

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News organizations in survival mode, or growth mode, can be subject to blinders. That’s why on June 23-24, 2026, we’ll convene our API Local News Summit on Measuring Impact for Civic Discourse.

Together we’ll unearth:

• Innovative ways news leaders are measuring and communicating trust and impact, especially as they seek to expand into additional neighborhoods, counties or other geographies
• Frameworks from outside of journalism that may help news leaders build or measure trusted relationships and gain mission-aligned supporters in new places
• Untapped potential to use news organization-collected data to bolster and create more representative and robust local news ecosystems

This convening marks the second of our summit series for 2026 — an election year, the year API turns 80 and right on the eve of our country’s semiquincentennial. We’re glad to host this convening in Pittsburgh, a backdrop suitable for thinking about neighborhood-level health, healthy and inclusive local news ecosystems and the democratic experiment Pennsylvania helped usher in.

We look forward to hosting this intimate, invitation-based and participatory gathering for approximately 60 leaders from across the country. They’ll represent the range of local media, for-profit and nonprofit, and all have active work touching this topic. We’ll also include a small number of measurement-minded leaders outside journalism to bring their experience to bear on this important moment for local media.

If this sounds like a convening for you, we want to know. And because this matters beyond the event itself, know that the work continues after. We’ll create resources informed by summit insights and share them far and wide. We’ll aim to encourage experimentation and adoption of practices. Through it all, we hope to unlock new ways to show and articulate the value of local news in civic discourse.