Community Engagement & Trust

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 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.

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.

When community members are no longer voters, their needs become diffuse once again and there is no clear, focusing mandate. So many newsrooms slip back into the usual: politics coverage driven by politicians and press releases. How do we avoid that backslide?

How can we avoid that backslide this time? 

We see in research how trusted messengers matter for news that’s shared. We know Millennials and Gen Z pay for or donate to support email newsletters or video or audio from independent creators at higher rates than newspapers.

Election-focused flyers, postcards and print voter guides will add to the knowledge of how news organizations can deploy print to reach new audiences and deepen community ties.