American Press Institute awards $40,000 in grants to help strengthen communication and teamwork to eight news organizations

The American Press Institute has awarded eight news organizations with $5,000 grants to complete projects that strengthen internal workplace culture as part of its 2025 Connection + Collaboration Learning Cohort.

The selected organizations are U.S. local and community-based media organizations that are alumni of the U.S.-based Table Stakes program and participated in the API Local News Summit for Belonging and Collaboration in July 2024.

“These grants will allow these organizations to bring to life the ideas discussed at our summit and experiment with projects that will result in meaningful changes to their internal work cultures,” said Emily Ristow, API’s Director of Journalism Strategy. “API will support these organizations through peer-learning calls where news leaders will pressure-test their ideas and clarify their experiments, and future case studies will share their lessons widely throughout the industry.”

The Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program advances innovations in local journalism through intensive change-management training for news leaders. API manages a network of more than 200 Table Stakes alumni organizations, helping journalists and news leaders stay current on best practices from across the industry.

The American Press Institute works to help media and journalism leaders by conducting research and developing programs and products to build successful, healthy news organizations. By facilitating collaborative discussions and learning we seek to move the news industry forward.

The 2025 Connection + Collaboration Learning Cohort and grants are funded by The Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund.

CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR 2025 GRANTEES:

Charlottesville Tomorrow (Virginia) will reconfigure its monthly staff learning calls to include outside speakers, enhancing its organizational goal of proactively educating staff and strengthening internal systems before urgent events arise.

Fort Worth Report (Texas) will develop a structured employee engagement program that includes team-building, quarterly training and monthly lunches to create an environment that encourages communication, trust and continuous development.

KERA (Texas) will hold a series of events and connection opportunities that encourage cross-departmental engagements and a sense of belonging while teams are dispersed across multiple locations after staff vacates the current building in late February 2025.

Knox News (Tennessee) will survey staff about their experiences and efforts to ensure Black communities are truly and fully present in their coverage. Based on those findings, it will create an introductory training program for new journalists and ongoing training for all journalists; organize a regular conversation series; and formalize the training component of its partnership with the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, the Knoxville-based repository of Black history and culture in East Tennessee.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin) will help managers expand and tailor their approaches to providing regular, thoughtful and helpful performance feedback to employees. It will also hold a series of newsroom engagement activities, including paid meet-ups for each staffer to get to know a colleague, and incentives for a team-based citywide scavenger hunt and trivia event. These efforts will help the paper continue to respond to recent company engagement survey results and newsroom-wide discussions about how to improve feelings of staff belonging, connectedness and inclusion.

The Sacramento Bee (California) will conduct a newsroom culture survey, the first step in its project to further collaboration and foster a sense of belonging among its journalists. Funding will also support management training and staff engagement activities determined by the survey.

The Seattle Times (Washington) will conduct a follow-up training session delving into LGBTQ+ issues to continue to foster inclusion in the workplace and deepen its newsroom’s understanding of how to better support LGBTQ+ teammates and community members.

Washington Informer (D.C.) will hold a listening tour among its 25 full- and part-time staff. The tour will inform a staff retreat featuring guest speakers, goal-setting for 2025 and awards for innovative staff.

ABOUT THE AMERICAN PRESS INSTITUTE

The American Press Institute supports local and community-based media through research, programs and products that foster healthy, responsive and resilient news organizations. API envisions an inclusive democracy and society, where communities have the news and information they need to make decisions and thrive.  API is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization affiliated with the News/Media Alliance.

ABOUT THE KNIGHT-LENFEST LOCAL NEWS TRANSFORMATION FUND

With a focus on sustainability and equity, The Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund was designed to strengthen local journalism at scale, by supporting journalistic excellence and serving the information needs of communities. The Knight-Lenfest Fund collaborated with news organizations, leaders and communities to grow capacity and meet journalism’s technology, business and audience realities of the future. It believes that journalism is at its best when it is of service. The Knight-Lenfest Fund was a joint venture of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

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