Although news fatigue is on the rise, people often have an endless reservoir of love and care for the places they live and the neighborhoods they call home. This presents opportunities for local news leaders who want to strengthen community relationships that sustain their businesses.
In April, the American Press Institute convened nearly 70 news leaders and experts from non-news spaces for our Local News Summit on Local Identity, History and Sustainability in Nashville, Tenn. Leaders from organizations such as Block Club Chicago, L.A. Taco, Chattanooga Times Free Press and Verite News spoke with one another about how they have leveraged history, nostalgia, archives, community markers and partnerships to build products, services and experiences that drive revenue.
One point that resonated: Leaning into local identity and history can move our journalism from ‘we provide facts alone’ to ‘we provide facts and serve other important community functions.’
Too often, as journalists, we focus exclusively on the news values of accuracy, trustworthiness, independence, fairness, etc. We rarely have the time to step back and consider how our news organizations contribute additional value — that is, other impact — to our community and its members. But we know local media do more. Local news can add value to our communities by helping people make informed decisions, building connections between the past and present, enriching conversations through complexity or nuance, and bridging individual differences.
At API Summits, news leaders gain a higher perch from which to view their work, successes and opportunities. They also get dozens of thought partners to pin down ideas and test language, shoulder to shoulder. But just as we encourage our summiters to leave the attributions and take the learnings, we aim to do the same.
What follows is how we explored the additional value local news creates for communities. Programming was informed by our curated group of attendees, all of whom were working on the theme.
Consider: Carve out two undistracted hours in one day to tackle a single but significant question — What community value does my journalism provide when it leverages, covers, re-reports, packages, and convenes around local identity and history?
First, consult the hierarchy of value
The right combination of universal building blocks of value can create new loyalties and a new willingness from folks to try your brand.
However, the news cycle makes it more difficult to identify these other ways local news can help the community. They are not always apparent to us as journalists. They can, however, be critical to sharing our impact narrative and communicating our function in the community — value worth paying for.
Credit: Harvard Business Review
This pyramid illustrates fundamental attributes of value in their essential and distinct forms, with the most fruitful residing at the top.
Some are inwardly focused, addressing consumers’ personal needs. Others are outwardly focused, helping customers interact with or navigate the world around them. Your organization’s added value beyond providing facts will include some functional elements to deliver on the higher-order elements of emotional, life-changing and social impact value.
But in the summit room, we heard an overemphasis on the functional values of our journalism and news products. We also heard resounding opportunities when exposed to this new framework. How might our journalism reduce anxiety, provide access, cultivate belonging, inspire motivation or even encourage self-transcendence? These ideas are big but valuable. Consulting the hierarchy of value helped our summiters identify new opportunities for their organizations.
Consider: Do I have any preconceptions of journalism that may limit how I see my journalism’s role in the community? How can I define — and communicate — the added value my local news organization creates, the impact that complements our fact-based reporting? How could my journalism add new value to the community it was created for?
Next, consider your dream team and collaborators
With a new understanding of the added value of our journalism, we constructed a Post-it pile of our problems and how this new framework could inform both the problem we choose to solve and the team we create to solve it.
For most news organizations, capacity building is a necessity. When we step away from the office and the bylines to consider the kinds of teams we can build to serve the communities we report for, we find there are more choices when we extend our sightline beyond arm’s length.
So, how do you build a dream team, inclusive of community stakeholders, that fosters collaboration and drives impact for everyone?
Start by knowing the characteristics of a high-performing team. Build upon a foundation of trust. Place a premium on clear and effective communication. For a little razzle-dazzle, add a touch of creative abrasion — that is, the constructive conflict that happens around ideas, not personalities.
There are three key players on a collaborative, cross-community dream team.
- The Quarterback: This person sets and monitors the vision. They call the plays and can see the field. They can run some tasks but should not be a go-to for assignments, if possible. Their job is to coach and encourage the team over the finish line.
- The Bridge: This person serves as a cultural broker, and their role spans multiple departments, meaning they understand how other people or teams operate. On your collaborative team, this person acts as the go-between, especially as you get deeper and more committed to the work, which takes more effort and time.
- The Adhesive: This person is also a cultural broker, but their role is to foster mutual understanding and respect within the team. They are a glue that keeps everyone’s focus fixed on the North Star and keeps them all stuck together as equal partners.
Consider: Who is on your dream team? When you reflect on missed opportunities and failures, what dream team roles might have been missing? How does your dream team change when the problem you’re solving changes?
See what others are doing, in and outside of news
As journalists, we often convene by role, affiliation or discipline, but API Local News Summits intentionally convene around a challenge. Our summits are designed for everyone to both teach and learn.
So what are others doing that you can learn from? A lot. When it comes to leveraging local identity and history for bottom-line sustainability, news leaders are experimenting with AI-powered tools, fundraising and becoming a community hub to build products, experiences and services that drive revenue. A short list of examples includes how to:
- Create a newsletter series that welcomes residents into their community’s story
- Pair subscriptions with local pride, such as neighborhood-based art, merchandise or even craft beer
- Partner with local businesses to highlight community heritage and boost shared visibility
- Offer ticketed history tours that cultivate belonging, serve specific community segments and generate revenue
Likewise, there are frameworks and research from outside the news industry that can further catalyze this work. For example:
- How might we understand the science of nostalgia and collective memory as we report and re-report our community’s history? A conversation facilitated by Andrew Abeyta of the Human Flourishing Lab
- How might we use local journalism to strengthen our neighborhoods through bonding and bridging? A conversation facilitated by Seth Kaplan, Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University
- How might we inform school curriculum and engage Gen Z through reporting on local history? A conversation facilitated by Tess Benoit of the History Co:Lab
- How might we understand local identity through music preferences and data? A conversation facilitated by Emily White, #IVoted Concerts
Consider: How are you thinking against the grain of your newsroom culture? What content, services and products have you seen others create that might add value to your life? When was the last time you were delighted by a piece of information?
Now, drive new value propositions that complement your journalism
Part of solving the right problems is naming them in detail. The nitty gritty matters when you’re building something a community of people will deem valuable enough to support with their time and money.
Additionally, knowing the new value propositions of your journalism is key for communicating your impact and asking for financial buy-in. We love the value proposition canvas from Strategizer for this because it decenters the newsroom and their needs, putting a very specific and defined community segment, along with their pains and gains, at the forefront of the design process.
Consider: What assumptions are you bringing to the table when trying to solve community problems? How are you maintaining traditional, soapbox journalism when envisioning products and services for specific parts of your community? With your organization’s resources and the community’s ideas, what might you build in partnership with one another?
We asked some summit participants to reverse engineer their news products and services as examples of how community can be centered in our revenue ideas and innovations.
L.A. Taco, for example, leveraged a food, tacos, core to its community’s identity to create a novel membership program. Here’s how publisher Alex Bloomingdale shared it:
If your news organization needs help in how they’re thinking about, and moving toward, leveraging community identity — be it through food, landmarks or history — please contact us. And if you’re interested in partnering or financially supporting our efforts to help local news think creatively and critically about how they support their communities sense of belonging and joy, please let us know that, too.
Gratitude goes to the Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism, our Resources and Insights Sponsor for our API Local News Summit on Local Identity, History and Sustainability. Their support expands the public-facing resources we can make from this gathering. To learn more about supporting future API Local News Summits of news leaders, please contact us.
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