Community Engagement & Trust

The plans — each supported by a $3,000 grant from API and refined with API's help — will build connections with new audiences and serve communities by prioritizing storytelling and positive impact.

This initiative will help participants develop influencer collaborations around their journalism, including co-hosted Instagram reels to share reporting and promote products, explanatory reporting, ongoing partnerships and live events.

Steps news organizations can take to set up their own community advisory committees based on lessons from the Pittsburgh Inclusion Index cohort.

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.’

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.

After four months of learning and experiments, our American Press Institute and Knight Election Hub cohort on influencer collaborations has concluded. Here's what we learned.

After a six-month pilot of an ecosystem-wide local news advisory committee, we’re sharing a multi-part perspective series on this effort: an outgrowth of our deep, three-year commitment to the Pittsburgh media ecosystem, which included two learning cohorts, a dozen community listening sessions and now this committee.

As research continues to inform this slice of the news industry, we’ll continue learning, too. Who gets to be called a journalist in 2025? What is the future of trustworthy information, especially considering the access to and trust for online content creators? How might journalism adapt to the rise, or co-opt the styles, of news influencers?

As stewards of the “first draft of history” in their community — and sometimes sitting on archives of historical significance as a result — news organizations and history can be a natural fit.

A case study on one Pittsburgh-area newsroom's efforts to strengthen their connections with traditionally marginalized communities through the API Inclusion Index project.