American Press Institute

Once you’ve identified the impact signals you want to spark, think about opportunities to do so beyond your coverage by designing events, programs and spaces that help you both create and learn from your newsroom’s impact. This learning loop can guide decisions about where to invest your time, reporting and social capital next. Impact-minded organizations build habits that help them notice what their communities are responding to, interpret what those signals might mean and adapt their journalis

There’s a certain irony in celebrating the 80th anniversary of an organization whose job is to help an industry navigate change. Longevity, after all, was never the goal. Relevance is. For the American Press Institute, turning 80 is an opportunity to think less about where we’ve been and more about what local journalism needs at this moment. That feels particularly important at a time when many of the assumptions that have shaped our industry for decades are being rewritten. I’ve experienced API

Each person in a newsroom has a different perspective on the type of impact they want their work to have. With so many definitions and stakeholders, impact can’t fall to the engagement or analytics teams alone to track and manage. It has to become part of how everyone plans, reviews and improves the journalism — organizations learn when everyone is responsible for a piece of the conversation or the outcome. How one newsroom integrated impact into its reporting Everyone in the newsroom needs to n

A few months into building a team, NC Local was doing what many newsrooms do: sharing early wins through forwarded emails and Slack messages, dropping testimonials into a shared doc and using a spreadsheet to track republication of its work. They recognized the various formats and places for documenting impact weren’t giving them a full picture, and they also wanted to understand the deeper impacts of their work beyond traditional metrics, writes Catherine Komp, NC Local’s engagement director. A

Welcome to September’s Need to Know Special Edition on identifying and acting on the impact of your work. This week’s action: Identify important impact signals your newsroom might be receiving but isn’t taking note of. Local newsrooms are confident in measuring what they publish and produce, but a bit less certain about measuring what their work changes. Defining impact differently — much less quantifying it — isn’t a universal practice, but acknowledging that impact is plural is a good place t

Rocky Mountain Public Media is Colorado’s largest statewide, member-supported multimedia organization, home to Rocky Mountain PBS, KUVO Jazz and THE DROP. Our broadcast signal reaches nearly every region of our state. Yet reach alone doesn’t tell us whether communities feel connected to us, see themselves in our content, or whether they believe they have meaningful ways to participate. Those questions have become increasingly important to us at a time when so much media can leave people feeling

As journalists, we cannot control the impact of our work. We find and expose the truth, we explain how complicated things work and we create resources that help people. But we have no direct control over what people do with the information we give them. At the same time, journalism is often the direct cause of positive change that makes peoples’ lives better. We see this when lawmakers start fixing broken systems that we investigated, when families are reunited because of our reporting, or when

I’ll never forget the conversation I had with an environmental funder in late 2024. She asked whether journalism actually moved anyone to do anything. I started to answer and realized I couldn’t. I had stats about our traffic. I had republication credits, including data center reporting that moved on the AP wire. I had institutional wins, including a city that corrected a decade of bad public information the day we published our reporting. All of that shows how far the work traveled and how offi

Last winter, in preparation for the growing season ahead, I laid new mulch around my raised beds so that, come summer, I could easily watch the plants grow, prune lower leaves, check soil moisture and adapt in other ways my garden needed. But in June, some cherry tomato volunteers started poking through the gaps in the mulch. With the sun and steady rain, they seemed to grow inches a day and began to take over one of my tidy raised beds. Certainly, there would be a bounty of tomatoes, but I coul

The signs that local news organizations add civic value and engagement to community life — that they make civic conversation and decision-making better — are often subtle. These signals can show up in community actions and behaviors: repeat participation, increased questions and/or comments, public use of the journalism and community-led initiatives spurred by reporting. Moreover, these signals add up to something deeper: the strength of the relationship between a newsroom and the community. Tho

This week’s action: Identify actionable solutions from non-news experts’ insights. At the American Press Institute, we often encourage news leaders to consider their role in helping communities share their diverse perspectives, life experiences and lessons to confront and solve common problems. We also see how that approach benefits the news industry itself — we can learn from organizations outside of traditional media that are taking different approaches to working in the same ecosystems and fa

Nearly 40% of people in Chicago said in a recent study that they lacked information on their neighborhoods and how to get involved in civic life. Chicago Public Media decided to try something new to solve this gap. They plan to launch chicago.com this fall, which will feature some news stories from WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times. The ultimate goal, though, is to design a space to help people connect with each other. They’ll measure how the experiment is working via surveys and community focus gr

This week’s action: Think big about how a partnership with an outside organization can serve your community. In addition to collaborating with non-news experts to help inspire new ideas or problem-solve, journalists and researchers can collaborate on or pitch projects together. This approach can offer many benefits, including funding, structured support and methodologies, and concrete data or findings. This approach can be mutually beneficial. Journalists — skilled at asking questions — can push

This week’s action: Identify an expert to help you address a challenge your newsroom frequently encounters. Addressing systemic local news issues, such as building trust or overcoming polarization, can be more effective and sustainable when part of your approach includes learning from outside experts, who can help surface new methodologies or approaches. Integrating support from non-news experts into your experiments or problem-solving can be done in practical ways. The Local Media Association’s

This week’s action: Find a non-news resource you can regularly engage with to spark new ideas.   For most overarching news organization challenges, there are probably frameworks, trainings, think pieces and other resources to help news leaders identify solutions (you’re reading one right now!). But looking for insights outside the media bubble — especially for topics other industries are grappling with, too — can offer new perspectives and approaches to try out in the newsroom. At the Ameri

The American Press Institute is hosting a Local News Summit on Oct. 6-7 in Boise, Idaho, to identify and advance solutions that help local news leaders design experiences and products that encourage individual and community well-being. Technology offers incredible benefits, such as connection across distances, increased self-expression and knowledge sharing. At the same time, many Americans are growing tired of an “always on” or “plugged in” culture, and are increasingly

This week’s action: Identify a topic, experiment or challenge that could benefit from collaborating with researchers. Try this Start here: Identify a topic or challenge that you could use an outside perspective on. This could be an area of coverage that’s lacking, an audience you’re struggling to engage, an impact metric you’d like to study or an experiment you’ve been meaning to try. Need some inspiration? See if the latest research on news and journalism from RQ1 sparks an idea. Take action:

Welcome to our August Need to Know Special Edition series on partnering with non-news experts. The challenges local news faces — news deserts, burnout, community trust and connection — don’t exist in a vacuum. They are influenced by and interlock with trends in communities and the country, such as economic and technological change, demographic and educational trends, and political polarization. And for each challenge, there is knowledge from other sectors that can help: Journalists can use rese

At the American Press Institute’s recent Local News Summit on Measuring Impact for Civic Discourse, I asked a room full of news leaders to stand up. Then I started naming audiences. Funders. Newsroom staff. Board members. Community members. Subscribers. Local businesses. I asked them to sit down if they felt genuinely confident in how they communicate impact to that group. When I named community members and local businesses, almost nobody had sat down. Here’s the part that stuck with me. T

The American Press Institute seeks a part-time, client-facing independent contractor to provide customer support to our newsroom partners using API’s products, Metrics for News and Source Matters, for the remainder of 2026, with an option to extend through 2027. Our products help dozens of news organizations strategically use their data to better understand their audiences and reinforce long-term editorial goals beyond reach. Metrics for News is our proprietary analytics tool that helps news org