Welcome to our April Need to Know series on the Digital Transformation Guide — a resource of proven and tested strategies that can accelerate digital transformation in local news. Each week Emily Ristow, the American Press Institute’s Director of Journalism Strategy, will walk you through a key strategy from the guide and offer an exercise you can do to try it.
When I was working in local news organizations, I was always on the lookout for who was doing things better — who was finding new and better ways to tell stories, who was increasing digital subscribers faster, who was growing audiences and reaching new people?
This wasn’t about being competitive against other news organizations, it was about finding inspiration and identifying tested, successful strategies that we could tweak and adopt to improve our journalism and better serve our communities.
Being challenged to develop new and unique strategies and having the privilege of behind-the-scenes access to other organizations doing the same were some of the things I found most valuable about my participation in the yearlong Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program.
These accomplishments didn’t come quickly or easily. Organizations in my cohort overhauled workflows and learned new skills. We shifted our thinking to be wholly focused on audiences. We tried and sometimes failed when experimenting with new platforms and coverage formats, embracing the humility and welcoming the resilience that comes along with that.
Two years later, I became a coach in the program. Shortly after, I took over management of the American Press Institute’s Table Stakes program and coordination across the other Table Stakes programs, housed at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, University of North Carolina’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media and the Poynter Institute. This gave me a broader understanding of all that was happening in local news — both the turmoil and the bright spots. It also helped me gain a deeper appreciation of how valuable it was to have this experience in a yearlong change management program, as well as the level of resources — time, staff, money — needed to develop these strategies from scratch.
From 2015 to 2024, more than 200 local news organizations participated in the yearlong Table Stakes program and its subsequent shorter-term “sprint” programs, funded by The Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
In the yearlong change management program, news organizations learned the table stakes, key digital skills needed for news publishers to thrive in the digital era, and the tools of Performance Driven Change. Both the table stakes and the Performance Driven Change tools were developed by Douglas K. Smith, who is also the founder of the Media Transformation Challenge program built around this intellectual property. More than 60 coaches helped guide teams through the programs.
Crucially, part of being in the Table Stakes program is agreeing to share your tactics and frameworks so that others can apply them in their own organization.
The Digital Transformation Guide from the American Press Institute features strategies tested and proven by local news organizations that participated in the Table Stakes Local program along the themes of product thinking, revenue, engaged journalism, collaboration and managing change.
As digital platforms and their users continue to grow and change, the ways news outlets build strategies around them will, too. These are themes we believe are key for digital transformation and sustaining and growing local news.
– Emily Ristow, API director of Journalism Strategy
Share with your network
- Strategies for digital transformation
- Experiment with a product-thinking mindset
You also might be interested in:
Newsroom experiments unearthed many ideas and epiphanies, including a roadmap for an influencer collaboration. We’ll walk you through each step, offering action items, resources and tips from newsrooms who have already worked through this process.
The next API Local News Summit will be on how local and community-based media might engender a local identity and embrace their geography and history. We’ll help news leaders consider how they contribute to a community’s well-being by fostering a sense of place — and how, when done with care, this might offer new ways to sustain local news.
This guide features strategies tested and proven by local news organizations that participated in the Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program along the themes of product thinking, revenue, engaged journalism, collaboration and managing change.
