Report

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.

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?

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.

We imagine a future where evidence, data and peer assessment support decision-making in journalism — whether by reporters, editors or news executives — and where journalism better informs the questions researchers ask.

Longtime philanthropic supporters of journalism are doubling down on local journalism specifically—and encouraging others to join them.

How might you partner with philanthropy or take donations to bolster your opinion section’s role as a convener and contributor to civic discourse?

News leaders have told us that they want to better support reporters and editors who will be covering an election for the first time. That’s why we’re sharing portions of this media guide to covering elections and voting from The Elections Group.

This guide is an effort to point to and organize resources in ways that can be helpful to journalists looking to put words to what they’re feeling and manage those stresses, as well as resources for managers and first-person accounts from peers.

How do local newsrooms cover elections at a time when democratic principles are under attack, basic voting procedures are questioned, and many people fear the future of personal rights?

The lone editor at a small newsroom owned by a large corporation was overwhelmed, once again. A few big stories had consumed his entire staff [...]