When Max Kabat and his wife Maisie Crow were imagining the future of the Big Bend Sentinel, they looked to its past. How could they refresh the brand visually without making a wholesale change?

That’s when the newspaper’s nameplate caught their eyes.

“It’s sort of beautiful — a vaquero and his horse,” Kabat said. “It was about building a way to make it more modern, but paying homage to what came before us.” They tidied it up and adopted it as the new — and old — emblem of the brand.

They’ve brought the same approach to the whole Sentinel project, infusing its publication as well as its physical community space in Marfa with a design sensibility that’s contemporary and clean but anchored to and informed by the paper’s nearly 100-year history. (The Big Bend Sentinel marks its centennial in 2026 — a milestone that Kabat is now thinking about how to commemorate.)

There’s a natural tension in the way news organizations think about the past. On the one hand, news is supposed to be new — stories from yesterday, last week or years ago belong at the bottom of the bird cage, or so some think. But if news is the first draft of history — if the past, as Faulkner famously said, is not even past — a news archive can be a community’s most foundational historical collection, and a starting point for all kinds of new thinking and storytelling.

Or, as Kabat said more simply: “Local journalism is rooted in capturing the history of a place and its people.”

So why not nose around old stories from your community and see if you can make something really new? 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.

Figure out what you have 

If you’re curious about how to get started with using the archives to inspire your coverage, the best thing you can do is “just jump in,” said Jason Dressel, CEO of The History Factory, a brand heritage and archives agency based in Washington, D.C.

“Spend a few hours looking at what you have,” Dressel said. “What do you have in your archives that is unique?”

Chances are, it won’t take long to find a few threads you’re curious to pull on. Once you do, the possibilities are limitless. News teams shared examples at the summit of using their archives to develop true crime podcasts, regular “from the archives” or “this week in history” columns, sports history documentaries and features revisiting major stories from a community’s past. Some have found success sharing old photos and headlines on Instagram and other social channels.

Local journalism is rooted in capturing the history of a place and its people.

Drew Trafton is the content manager at Forum Communications, a media company that owns more than 35 brands across the Upper Midwest. No stranger to historical storytelling, Trafton has worked on several local television shows informed by the community’s history — true crime and sports history, in particular. But the recent digitization of The Fargo Forum, the daily newspaper of Fargo, N.D., has opened up an even richer vein of opportunity for Trafton and his team to get a better grasp on projects they were already working on.

“We had just failed to realize how much we had left on the table until we were able to look back at this digitized archive and dive into all of the little context clues that were laid out in these articles for us,” Trafton said, adding that digging through the archives to add historical detail to their storytelling was inspiring “new ideas for entire shows.”

“It’s a gold mine, basically,” Trafton said. “We just have to do the mining to get to it.”

The digitization project — completed in partnership with Newspapers.com — is also generating passive revenue for Forum. Newspapers.com digitized the Forum’s archives at no cost to the company, and each time a Newspapers.com user views archival Forum content, the company earns a small amount of money. The company also receives a commission for any Newspapers.com subscription purchases it refers.

Coming back from the summit, Trafton said he’s inspired to explore the idea of creating merch from the paper’s archives — maybe printing a headline from a big sports championship on a stadium blanket — and teaming up with a local small business to offer that merch to their customers.

The idea is not to glorify the past, Trafton said, but to “pick out those moments of celebration” that people in the community might want to collect and commemorate.

Scout other sources of local history

So what do you do when you don’t have access to your own archives? Luckily for history-curious reporters or editors, the storage closets and acid-free filing boxes of libraries and historical societies hold a wealth of local history.

The Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation is an umbrella funder for several news organizations in Southern California. Some of its member organizations have their own archives, but others don’t.

Julie Makinen, secretary/treasurer of the foundation, is looking for ways to help member newsrooms figure out how to bring some of those collections to light.

“There are many publications that … no longer exist, but these historical societies have them,” Makinen said. “We’re trying to sort of surface those to the general public as windows into history. We’re also trying to surface them to local reporters, so they can know how to access them (and) find interesting stories there that they might be able to turn into content for their publications.”

She’s in the “exploratory stages” of developing a program that will teach reporters how to get deeper into the archives held by local historical societies and libraries, she said — inspired in part by conversations in Nashville.

She’s also starting to develop a talk that will help both reporters and local historical societies and history lovers understand the incredible media history of the region.

“There’s a really interesting media history here — tied up in Hollywood as an experimental media landscape — because it was so close to Los Angeles but also super isolated,” Makinen said. A history presentation to local libraries and newsrooms has the potential to “educate people about the media past, present and future that’s happening here.”

Come up with some date pegs

If you’re looking for a place to start with archival storytelling, it can help to brainstorm some significant dates that you can hang a story or project on. (In my personal experience, this can also help get history projects greenlit by news leadership, if that has been a challenge.)

Maybe that’s a national story with local resonance. A big one is coming up in 2026: the U.S. Semiquincentennial, a.k.a. the 250th anniversary of American independence. Cardinal News in Southwest Virginia has already started exploring overlooked stories of the region’s contributions to the Revolution through a three-year series of stories and podcasts. The 25th anniversary of 9/11, with all of its sprawling effects on American identity, foreign policy, national security and civil liberty, will also take place in 2026. News archives can give you a sense of what it was like for people in your community to experience national and world-historical events like 9/11 — or the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, the repeal of Prohibition, the moon landing — you name it.

You could also think about milestones of major events in your community’s history that are coming up. What about those events still resonate in your community today? Are people still alive who were part of it? What about the reporters and photographers who documented it?

“Happy or sad, people love to feel a connection to their place,” Kabat said.

Want to start working on your own history project? Here are some places to start:

  • Look for moments of “community celebration” like a sports championship or a shared local triumph: “Every town has a game or a moment that just meant a lot to the town, not just because of what was happening on the court or in the rink,” Trafton said about the sports history projects his team has worked on.
  • Identify other local keepers of history, and consider teaming up: Maybe this is a local historical society or library. Some libraries may even have your local newspaper archives or photo collections available digitally or on microfiche. Or maybe this is an elder in your community who is a living repository of community memory. Talk to them!
  • What defines your community? What histories are important to your readers? Use historical themes to build a story, a project, a film or podcast, or even a tour or live event. Some examples that were shared at the summit included freedom stories of the Underground Railroad in the Midwest and Canada; Cold War-era nuclear armament stories from North Dakota; what it means to live in a border region; food history and identity (beer! tater tots!); the decades-long repercussions when a major employer shutters or relocates; or even something as simple as how the streets in your community got their names.   
  • Visit your local historic cemetery. The richness of community history kept within your local historic cemetery’s gates may surprise you. The cemetery where I work holds burial records that go back nearly 200 years, but also deed purchase paperwork and correspondence between lot owners and their heirs and the cemetery trustees. I found one letter recently from a prominent local artist asking the trustees to send a new copy of his lot deed, which he had lost in the San Francisco Fire of 1906. Cemetery keepers may also be able to point you to notable, notorious or surprising lesser-known stories from around the grounds.

Amy Elliott Bragg is a freelance history writer, tour guide and speaker. A former editor for Crain’s Detroit Business and The Detroit News, she now works at Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit as director of the Historic Elmwood Foundation. You can find her work at littledetroithistoryletter.substack.com.

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