Special Edition

When local newsrooms give people the tools and platforms for creative storytelling, they’re also building trust and supporting the creative and cultural health of their communities. Here's how for news leaders did just that.

New year, same old meetings. Meetings that don’t include the right people or that include too many people. Meetings that could have been an email. But what if it didn’t have to be that way? As we kick off 2026, API wants to help you reset and rethink key meetings in your news organization.

It’s been a busy year for us: we held three API Local News Summits, built out a comprehensive guide to partnering with influencers, encouraged experiments with grants and cohorts, and supported news organizations with our products.

The Houston Chronicle created small-scale experiments that tested how strategically work with a creator while navigating potentially thorny issues around ethics, control and impact. In this series, they walk you through what they did.

What if we started looking at our output as a product, not a service? Too often, we think "product" means a fancy app or a new website. But product isn’t about tech. It’s about intention.

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?

How four Nashville summit participants are fostering local identity within their communities and ways you can try similar efforts in your own newsroom.

We assembled a working group of news leaders determined to find solutions to help their peers navigate the process of building capacity and strengthening cultures of learning.

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

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.