Top articles of 2025

API shared articles and resources about ways to build trust with communities, tell impactful stories, engage younger audiences and navigate the unique challenges of working in this industry. Here are some of the most popular articles from this year:

• The power of intergenerational storytelling to solidify community and effect change
• Journalists and mental health: An API resource guide, updated October 2025
• Explore how local identity and history can strengthen community engagement and sustainability

2 guides

API published two in-depth guides that feature lessons and successes from local and community news organizations across the country and steps you can take to adopt these strategies:

• The Digital Transformation Guide from the American Press Institute offers proven strategies for local media, as tested by news organizations in the Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program. Each of the five key sections outlines tactics other newsrooms have used and includes a “try this” section.
• API’s Guide to Influencer Collaborations is a robust, 12-part resource that walks newsrooms through what partnerships with content creators look like, including how to find the right influencer, how to safeguard against ethical concerns and how other newsrooms are experimenting with this approach. Don’t know where to start? Check out the FAQ.

12 special editions

Our Need to Know Special Editions highlight API and partner voices on the issues most relevant to news organizations, offering actionable insights and resources you can implement immediately. Themes included:

• Leading teams with equity: We explored a paradigm shift as modern news organizations are becoming more intentional workplaces that can show care to their journalists and empower them to be leaders in their own right.
• Support cultures of learning: We assembled a working group of news leaders determined to find solutions to help their peers navigate the process of building capacity and strengthening cultures of learning.
• Adopt a product mindset for news: This series helps news organizations begin to think about their output as a product, not a service, by starting with the problem their community is facing​​.
• Experimenting with Creators: The Houston Chronicle created small-scale experiments that tested how to strategically work with a creator while navigating potentially thorny issues around ethics, control and impact. In this series, they walk you through what they did.

21 guest essays

API commissioned five essay series this year, sharing first-person insights from news leaders, non-news experts and news advisory committee participants doing work aligned with our four areas of focus. Our final essay series of the year, on engaging communities via storytelling, will run later this week. The other series are:

• 5 environments where generational solidarity is needed — and how local journalism can help
• 4 ways local news can build local identity — and bring in new revenue
• From listening to action: What a local news advisory committee taught Pittsburgh newsrooms
• Pluralism and polarization: The value of research for local journalism

28 Better News case studies

API’s Better News published case studies and articles by and about local and community news leaders experimenting with revenue strategies, building community partnerships and collaborating with trusted messengers. The five most popular articles are:

• How building a local creator map can lead to stronger community connections
• 15 photojournalism tips for reporters, from the founder of Down in the County
• 8 revenue experiments you can replicate in your news organization
• 5 strategies for retaining print and digital subscribers
• What Gen Z journalists want news leaders to know

API is thankful for your engagement and support this year, and we’re excited to continue serving local news leaders and their communities in the year to come. The last Need to Know newsletter of 2025 will run on Dec. 19, and we’ll be back in your inbox on Jan. 5.