Civic Discourse & Democracy

Reaching younger audiences has long been a challenge for media organizations. As platforms evolve, trust in news shifts and news avoidance grows, it can feel especially difficult to connect with and serve multigenerational audiences in an authentic and sustainable way. How can news leaders do their part to represent and include community perspectives from members of different age groups?

For us, we knew one of our biggest hurdles to success would be challenging the assumptions, both spoken and unspoken, we held for others. Here’s what we’ve learned over the past three years of gathering multigenerational problem-solvers.

Generational tension has always existed, of course, but today it is amplified by several factors, both in our communities and our newsrooms. We asked five summit participants to share more about the ways they are engaging and serving multigenerational audiences.

The American Press Institute is hosting a local summit on October 9-10 in Washington, D.C., to empower news leaders in enhancing residents’ leadership and influence over their community’s information ecosystem.

These partnerships can help rebuild trust in local media by including more voices and perspectives, and they offer a foundation for repair, restoration and reinvention. They weave the community together, fostering multidirectional conversations, a shared sense of place and joint ownership over our civic future.

Reaching people across age groups is a complex proposition for news leaders. It involves identifying issues and topics that resonate with all ages, creating content on multiple platforms, and finding ways for people to move past assumptions about one another. But the current moment in America demands this kind of work.

The American Press Institute is convening its second API Local News Summit of 2025, addressing a challenge shared by local and community-based media of all types.

At the American Press Institute, we believe the need for more engaged and informed communities will continue to grow. It’s why we focus on the role the press can play in community and civic life, and in facilitating discussions across communities with all of their varied voices and constituencies.

We’ve gathered reflections from researchers in social science who have attended recent API Local News Summits, where they had the chance to interact with and explore how their work helps — and can be improved by insights from — local journalism.

The press will be much more effective in serving people and strengthening democracy if it learns from what researchers are learning. Among the examples and takeaways, you will find that news leaders and non-news experts alike value the opportunity to think differently about the challenges in front of them, about how local news can change and how research can ask different questions.