Kevin Loker

Director of Strategic Partnerships and Research

Kevin Loker serves as director of strategic partnerships and research for the American Press Institute. He helps API collaborate with and complement the work of other organizations that want to improve journalism and its business. In addition, he leads research initiatives and projects on emerging challenges in journalism that advance API’s core program areas.

Kevin’s work in partnerships spans several types of work. He has helped API secure and develop grant-funded programs that support news transformation, including a Community Listening Fellowship for journalists and a Listening & Sustainability Lab for publishers of color. He has overseen programs that have distributed to local news organizations more than $300,000 in funding to experiment with audience-centered journalism. He has organized nearly a dozen invite-only summits on other emerging challenges in journalism, such as reimagining opinion sections and developing reader revenue.

Kevin has also served on research teams since API’s reinvention as an applied think tank. He’s contributed to more than a dozen national studies on news audiences with the Media Insight Project, API’s joint research initiative with Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, as well as research into the ethics of philanthropic funding of journalism. In 2020, he served as a research assistant for the fourth edition of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect (2021).

Before API, Kevin worked in digital and membership services for the Online News Association. He is a former contributor to 10,000 Words, a media industry blog. Together with his wife Laura, he received a 2017 Catholic Press Association Award for an email newsletter for Catholics.

Email Kevin at kevin.loker@pressinstitute.org or follow him @kevinloker.

By Kevin Loker

Share the stories behind the opinions

Across the country, thoughtful editors are seeking more op-eds and contributions that get away from publishing pure “opinion,” which some might read as assertions based on data or perhaps bonafides.
By Kevin Loker

Expand the voices and audiences for local opinion journalism

When you look at your local opinion journalism, what elements can you tackle individually to increase the views and experiences included in the conversation?
By Kevin Loker

Bring non-news insights to the opinion section

If you widen your view of whom to learn from — even in your own community — what ideas and partnerships might follow?
By Kevin Loker

Reimagining local opinion journalism

If you were to start with a blank canvas, how would you build a new kind of local opinion and commentary section, from scratch, for this moment?
By Kevin Loker

Key findings for reaching Black Millennials and Gen Z with news

How should news organizations appeal to Millennial and Gen Z news audiences and keep them coming back? That question has been at the heart of a series of reports released in the past seven months by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press […]
By Kevin Loker

Join us to reimagine local opinion journalism

The American Press Institute is continuing to help news organizations reimagine local opinion journalism to promote  healthier civic discourse and to better understand its role in news business sustainability.
By Kevin Loker and Susan Benkelman

Guiding people to practical information: Key takeaways from experiments in ‘service journalism’

Service journalism is having a moment. Newsrooms large and small are discovering — and in some cases, rediscovering — that they can find traction in giving consumers practical information, on subjects ranging from voting to student debt to COVID-19, in a confusing world. With midterm elections approaching, economic concerns multiplying and the pandemic grinding onward, […]
By Kevin Loker

What local news organizations are learning by guiding audiences to practical information

Join the American Press Institute for a discussion Monday, June 27, 2022, on how publishers are building upon experiments with practical guides, messaging services and more, including lessons that may help guide outreach and coverage for the fall 2022 elections. Local news organizations seeking to better serve their communities in recent years have leaned into […]
By Kevin Loker

How might journalists help communities overcome division in our digital world?

Fractured, distrustful, polarized. Online and off, it’s easy to see why many of us use these words to describe our current moment. Most news organizations seek to inform and provide a common set of facts that can help their communities solve problems. But in today’s disrupted media environment, newsrooms have also wrestled with questions about […]
By Kevin Loker

Polarization, journalism and the ‘pictures in our heads’: A Q&A with Yanna Krupnikov

Polarization challenges journalists’ ability to do their jobs. With divergent narratives on the political left and right, it can feel almost immobilizing to figure out ways to convey facts to people who seem to live in entirely different realities. Navigating how to build trust with those communities may feel demoralizing, and especially so if prominent […]