A love letter to local news
How we’re putting in the work at the American Press Institute
When you’re in love, you have to put in the work. That was my thought as I read an email this week from Knight Foundation with the subject line, “We’re in love with local news. Are you?”
I am, this Valentine’s Day and every day. I have spent more than 20 years in newsrooms, mostly working in local news. It has been a career inspired by how my parents viewed the news as a necessary part of their lives, central to the communities where they lived, loved, worked and worshiped.
They loved the ability of the news to inspire and inform, but also its ability to question institutions and push for progress. My family watched local television news faithfully and regularly read The Mobile Press-Register, but we also depended on The Mobile Beacon, a Black weekly that covered stories and people who often didn’t make it into mainstream coverage. I think about the complexity of that media diet every day in my work at the American Press Institute.
I began working at API one year ago today. Since the beginning of 2022, we’ve brought aboard seven new team members while trying to develop a culture where people feel that they, their work and their professional growth are valued. We’re led by a team that is 75% women, 75% people of color and 50% LGBTQ (including me). Our entire team puts in the work because we love journalism and we love local news. We bring a diversity of experience in newsrooms and business to our jobs, and we’re excited to bring more of that to the fore this year as we try to help more news organizations manage change, understand their data, track their sources and build workplaces of belonging rooted in community.
At API, we help develop, support and sustain healthy local news organizations well beyond just the newsroom. In 2023, we are guided by these questions: What does a healthy, sustainable news organization look like holistically, and how can we help news organizations realistically assess where they are, and move in a positive direction?
A healthy, sustainable local news organization is one that aims for cultural competence, that understands the power diversity has to make journalism stronger, that sees it as a valuable link with the people in the communities that surround them.
A healthy, sustainable local news organization seeks to fill gaps in its knowledge through a rigorous process of interrogating its own systems and practices.
A healthy, sustainable local news organization practices innovation and experimentation that aligns with local life. It learns and evolves to meet the needs of its own community.
A healthy, sustainable local news organization is resilient, identifying challenges and weaknesses before they become points of failure, while planning for how to address them long term.
We see the need for healthy, sustainable local news organizations across the media landscape. It does not exist in a vacuum for one platform or medium. That is an important consideration as we think about our purpose.
API bridges the industry’s past, present and future. We are the nexus of digital and print, nonprofit and for-profit, legacy media and new media, public media and private media, community media and general-interest media. We help them learn from one another; we also help them move through stages of what it means to be a healthy news organization, whether they are dealing with revenue challenges, cultural challenges or effectively managing change.
Over the past year, we’ve been listening to hundreds of journalists, both news leaders and frontline workers, who have told us where they would like to see more help. These are now our primary areas of focus:
- Civic discourse and democracy, working with news organizations to help people better understand one another and what is at stake when they don’t have the local news and information they need to make decisions.
- Culture and inclusion, uplifting the positive behaviors affecting everyday work in news organizations and long-term staff development and retention.
- Community engagement and trust, supporting the deep listening and committed action that strengthens the ties journalists have to the places where they live and the people they serve.
- Revenue and resilience, investing time, training and money in the growth and sustainability of news organizations, their ability to weather the changing world of work and how people use and consume news and information.
Eleven hundred journalists participated in our programs in 2022, and it isn’t enough in the face of the problems before us and the industry. The work we have done through our initiatives must move more expeditiously. The experiments and the lessons must come more quickly. And we must scale what we are learning by involving more news organizations and communicating it across the sector in clearer, more effective ways. Even as we encourage others to interrogate their systems and practices, we must interrogate our own here at API.
I love local news, and if you’re reading this, you probably do too. I look forward to taking on these challenges and to working with you in 2023.
Michael Bolden is CEO and executive director of the American Press Institute. Connect with him on Twitter or Mastodon, or email him at Michael.Bolden@pressinstitute.org.
