Welcome to API’s March Need to Know Special Edition, where we’ll walk you through what it takes for your news outlet to experiment with influencer collaborations. The insights and resources we’ll share are largely informed by the experiences of newsrooms that participated in our recent Election + Influencers Learning Cohort for the Knight Election Hub.
Americans face increasing news fatigue. But that doesn’t mean they spend less time online or that people care less about their communities. In many cases, Americans encounter or choose other ways to learn about the subjects and places they care about — including from individuals with influence and in spaces that they trust.
It’s important that news leaders learn from these influencers as well as pursue opportunities to work together, which is why the American Press Institute, with the support of the Knight Election Hub, recently facilitated a four-month cohort of newsrooms to experiment with nonpartisan, election-based influencer collaborations.
The experiments unearthed many ideas and epiphanies, including a roadmap for an influencer collaboration, which starts with newsroom discussions and identifying partners and topics and guides you through execution and a retrospective. In this month’s series, we’ll walk you through each step, offering action items, resources and tips from newsrooms who have already worked through this process.
The cohort also revealed common concerns that we plan to address throughout this series — the ROI on this type of collaboration, whether influencers can do journalism, if they can appropriately represent the newsroom’s brand. There are questions we don’t know the answers to but hope that by starting this conversation — and supporting more news outlets to experiment in this space — we can find solutions together.
Ariel Zirulnick and Sam Ragland contributed to this special series.
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