Is your newsroom working to broaden the diversity of your sources to better reflect and serve the communities you cover? There are many ways to go about this work and one of the tangible ways to get started is to start the practice of auditing and monitoring sources quoted in local stories. For many newsrooms, […]

In recent months we at the American Press Institute have taken a deep dive into how news organizations can expand their sourcing to represent fairly and fully the diversity of their communities. In this post we’d like to share what we’ve learned, introduce new technology we’ve created so far to address the challenges, and invite […]

More than a year after the global pandemic became official, local journalism still grapples with the fallout — not only from the coronavirus but also by an intense nationwide racial reckoning, regional disasters including fires and storms, and ever-present gun violence and mass shootings. The flood of news events over the past year also exacerbated […]

A core goal of journalism is to lift up underheard voices. Sometimes, the best way to do that is to give those voices a stage and a microphone — and then get out of the way. That’s what happened at the culmination of a yearlong effort between Idaho Education News, a nonprofit news site, and […]

When COVID-19 infection rates began rising in southern Arizona in early spring, two things quickly became clear: one, predominantly Hispanic communities were suffering more than white communities, and two, people in those communities were desperate for reliable, relevant news — ideally, news in their native language. Prior to the pandemic, Liliana López Ruelas, Hispanic community […]

On May 31, as protests over the police killing of George Floyd swept the nation, staffers at the Long Beach Post in Long Beach, California, watched as some demonstrations in their own city turned violent. By the following morning, 170 businesses in downtown Long Beach had been damaged or looted, including the building where the […]

As the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted daily life in the U.S. and around the world, many news organizations have turned to texting services to reach their communities with critical news and information. Platforms like Reach, GroundSource and Subtext have helped news outlets learn about audiences’ information needs and address them directly via SMS. Some news […]

To support its community listening fellows and their newsrooms during the coronavirus pandemic, the American Press Institute will adjust grant plans and pay for all fellows to access the listening and engagement tool suite, Reach. The move supports up to all 10 newsrooms in the API Community Listening Fellowship, a grant-funded project to help news […]

The American Press Institute is grateful for the contribution of 10 engaged journalism experts who are advising journalists and news organizations in our Community Listening Fellowship. The fellowship, supported by a one-time grant from the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School for Journalism at CUNY, empowers 10 journalists and their newsrooms to […]

My interest in newsroom diversity began as a selfish one. I grew up in a very small, rural town of less than 300 people with a very cynical view of local media. When reporters from the two city papers in Columbia, Mo., would venture out from city limits to cover us, they always seemed to […]