Revenue & Resilience

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.’

Here are a few ideas for activating your archives that participants brought to the recent API Summit on Local History, Community and Identity in Nashville — plus some ideas we all brought home to try out in the weeks and months to come.

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.

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.

Examples of how newsrooms have spun up live events, products and third spaces to experiment with new sources of revenue while fostering community belonging.

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?

Interacting with your community and providing quality programming while providing the news may seem daunting, but it’s worth it.

Our belief in the brand and the business hasn’t wavered. When you’re a business with a mission, it becomes the only thing that matters.

Our mingles normally draw anywhere from 20 to 40 people. At a recent one, we had the mayor, a bank vice president, several retirees, a young entrepreneur and the owners of the bowling alley hanging out in our office, all chatting with each other and our newspaper staff.