Stephanie Castellano
Stephanie Castellano is a former editorial manager for API. She helped shape API’s editorial direction and produced API’s daily newsletter, Need to Know, which offers fresh, valuable insights for journalists, news executives, researchers and other media stakeholders. Before then, Stephanie was the communications manager for the Newseum Institute, the education and programs arm of the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where she produced a weekly newsletter on press freedom and other First Amendment rights that the Institute is working to advance. Stephanie has also worked as a writer and editor for the Association for Talent Development, a nonprofit dedicated to developing professional talent; and has reported on food and agriculture issues for The Christian Science Monitor, Civil Eats and Next City.
Find her on Twitter @SL_Castellano.
These news orgs are boosting revenue with locally themed merchandise
Last May, a pair of endangered piping plovers laid eggs on Chicago’s Montrose Beach. As cinema stars and mascots for local conservationists, the two birds – dubbed Monty and Rose – had already built up quite a fan base among Chicagoans. The nonprofit news outlet Block Club Chicago drew so many readers with its coverage […]
These news orgs are building beats from reader donations
Asking audiences to make a donation to support journalism may not have been something many local news organizations — apart from public media newsrooms, that is — had experience (or comfort) doing. The coronavirus pandemic helped change that. Thrown into severe financial distress at the onset of the pandemic, some news organizations started asking for […]
How Newsday and The Spokesman-Review keep more subscribers
On September 28, API hosted an online discussion on tactics for retaining subscribers. Many publishers are recognizing the critical need to invest more in subscriber retention — “Retention is the new acquisition,” says Gwen Vargo, API’s director of reader revenue. However, subscriber churn is a problem that has plagued the newspaper industry for years. API is […]
Where you can find API at ONA21
API is participating in sessions on source diversity, organizational buy-in and employee burnout; our affiliate Trusting News is leading a conversation on building trust through better crime coverage. The past two years have seen a lot of change and growth at API. We’ve worked hard to help newsrooms better understand their audiences through analytics, to […]
How to reinvest your time
For many people, the knee-jerk reaction to shedding work is immediately to find other stuff (more meaningful stuff!) to replace it with. That’s not really the point of this piece. If there’s one thing you should take away from this, it’s that it’s okay to do less. If your staff is overworked, overwhelmed, burnt out, […]
How to stop doing so many stories
It’s not just journalists who are overwhelmed with information. Audiences are too. People are consuming media all day long, in one form or another. So instead of merely contributing to information overload, news organizations need to help audiences navigate it. And that means focusing on quality over quantity. Many publishers are actually growing audiences by […]
A simple framework for deciding what to stop doing
It’s surprisingly difficult for organizations of any kind to stop doing things. And the more complex the thing (or the organization), the harder it can be to kill. Some of the reasons why may sound familiar to anyone working in a newsroom: Leaders and managers aren’t aware of all the projects happening across the organization, […]
How newsrooms can do less work – but have more impact
We’ve published a lot of articles at API about innovative things that news organizations are doing — they’re hosting events, they’re launching newsletters, they’re starting new beats, they’re translating more stories, they’re running reader hotlines, they’re campaigning for civility. All of it is good and meaningful work. But you know what our most popular piece […]
Keeping opinion local: The benefits of cutting national politics from opinion sections
When news organizations face cuts, opinion editors and writers are some of the first on the chopping block: Their work can be replaced by that of national syndicated columnists, saving precious dollars. But new research suggests that the long-term effects of that decision may be detrimental to local news organizations. Local news audiences, treated to […]
Block Club Chicago’s coronavirus hotline connects readers with questions to reporters with answers
People have questions. Journalists have answers. But it can be surprisingly difficult to connect the two. Someone wondering, for example, what COVID-19 testing options are available in their neighborhood can easily miss that story from their local news source, and they probably won’t go digging around on its website to find it. Helpful information can […]