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

Confusion about what’s news and what’s opinion is a big problem, but journalists can help solve it

People often don’t know whether the content they see is news or opinion, according to our recent pair of Media Insight Project surveys. In one survey, we asked people how easy or difficult it was to see the distinctions between news and opinion in media. Just over half of Americans say it’s easy to distinguish […]
By Kevin Loker and Ashley Kang

‘Focused listening’ can help address journalism’s trust problem — here are four examples

Public distrust and negative attitudes toward media are critical problems facing many news organizations. This distrust feels deepest among particular alienated groups — such as conservatives, or neighborhoods where a minority group is the majority — with whom many publishers have scant or shallow ties. Building trust with these disengaged or neglected communities will require […]
By Kevin Loker

API releases dataset for large-sample survey of people in media

Two years ago the American Press Institute released a large-scale study of communication graduates, “Facing Change: The needs, attitudes and experiences of people in media.” The collaboration involved 22 different universities with journalism or communication programs and analyzed responses from 10,482 people — a hefty sample of people trained for media jobs. Today we are […]
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

Charting new ground: The ethical terrain of nonprofit journalism

Overview A different kind of revenue, one that has nothing to do with advertising or subscriptions, is playing a larger role in journalism today. Nonprofit funding, once largely the province of public broadcasting, is becoming an important source of support for a new cohort of non-commercial news organizations —  many of them digital natives — […]
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

Download a PDF and topline results: The ethical terrain of nonprofit journalism

For printing and offline viewing, a PDF of the report and the topline results for the nonprofit news outlets, commercial news outlets, and funders are available for download.
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

Methodology for our survey of media and funders

The surveys of foundations and media organizations do not represent of all media-funding foundations, nonprofit media organizations or commercial news outlets in the United States. The precise size and scope of that universe is difficult to determine, but efforts were made to have as comprehensive and representative sample as possible. Although the surveys are not […]
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

Essays on the ethics of funders and nonprofit media

Surveys can be a valuable research tool because they can offer some sense of scale. But they do not allow respondents to articulate their ideas in depth. As a consequence, we commissioned five essays from prominent stakeholders in the journalism-funding eco-system: Two are from nonprofit news outlets, two from foundations that fund media, and one […]
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

A look at the landscape of nonprofit journalism

Although not all foundations or news organizations in the United States were surveyed, the data enhance our understanding of the world of nonprofit journalism in general and the landscape of newer nonprofit media in particular. This community shares many goals, experiences and problems with a variety of perspectives. Nonprofit news organizations A total of 94 […]
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

Motivations and potential conflicts of those who fund news organizations

The foundations and nonprofit media organizations surveyed are almost equally divided on the overall motive behind the financial support for media. Less than half of funders (43 percent) and nonprofits (40 percent) both say nonprofit media funding is “journalism driven,” indicating that media is funded in order to “strengthen a free press and to educate […]
By Tom Rosenstiel, William Buzenberg, Marjorie Connelly, and Kevin Loker

What metrics and outcomes funders ask for from news organizations

Another issue in the nonprofit news landscape is about metrics, or proof that work being underwritten is reaching an audience or perhaps having even more of an impact — such as changing public attitudes on an issue. The question of metrics is hardly new. Commercial news organizations for years have used some numbers to establish […]