API Year in review 2025

Welcome to API’s Year in Review! It’s been a busy year for us: we held three API Local News Summits, built out a comprehensive guide to partnering with influencers, encouraged experiments with grants and cohorts, and supported news organizations with our products. API team members have also been sharing their diverse expertise across industry events, training and in writing. Here are some resources we offered to help foster healthy, responsive and resilient news organizations in 2025.

Events, grants and programs

32 grants awarded

to local news organizations:

• Eight Table Stakes Local News Transformation Program alumni organizations in the 2025 Connection + Collaboration Learning Cohort, where they completed projects that strengthened internal workplace culture
• An additional eight Table Stakes alumni organizations in the 2025 Revenue Experiments Learning Cohort, where they evolved or iterated upon current strategies
• 16 local and community news organizations experimenting with creator-newsroom collaborations in the 2025 Influencer Learning Cohort

Here are just a few ways newsroom grantees used these resources in 2025:

• Planeta Venus partnered with high schoolers to interview peers and neighbors and produced videos sharing their findings to better inform media across Kansas of Latinos’ news and information needs
• THE CITY worked with a trusted messenger to create a video series that helped New Yorkers better understand the issues so they felt motivated to cast their ballot in the mayoral primary
• Pittsburgh’s Public Source built a diverse, regionally representative map of creators and trusted messengers to strengthen relationships and spark new opportunities for collaboration
• Bangor Daily News bundled its digital subscription product with a new newsletter product meant to give exclusive content to politics fanatics, along with an in-person launch focused on building a premier brand
• Factchequeado developed a course to train Latino influencers in the U.S. to recognize and counter Spanish-language dis- and misinformation and to communicate without spreading misinformation

23+ events

We brought together industry leaders for three API Local News Summits on:

• Local Identity, History and Sustainability in Nashville, Tenn.
• Civic Discourse Across Generations in Denver
• Inclusion, Belonging and Local Leadership in Washington, D.C.

It’s so easy to go to a conference and forget everything. You guys make it hard to forget.
— Rachel Crosby, The Salt Lake Tribune

We offered 12 free webinars, including two that were a part of API’s collaboration with the News Revenue Hub. Topics included:

• How The Forward grows audience across generations
• How the Nashville Banner embraces local identity and history
• How trauma-informed leadership recognizes and respects human experiences

We also sponsored eight industry events, including the 26th International Symposium on Online Journalism, the 2025 Student Press Law Center 50th Anniversary, the Collaborative Journalism Summit and a GroundTruth Project News & Brews event. 

16 news leaders

shared strategies in the Diversifying Revenue series

In 2025, we concluded the Diversifying Revenue webinar series for Table Stakes alumni, which featured news leaders and organizations that are rethinking how they can bring more value to their organization’s mission and the audiences they serve. Highlights from the series included:

• Revenue ideas to inspire, from Table Stakes alumni organizations
• Funding reporting beats with The Post & Courier’s P.J. Browning
• Bridging sales & editorial silos with Red Bank Green’s Kenny Katzgrau
• Empowering sales teams with Wisconsin Watch’s Richard E. Brown
• Retaining print and digital subscribers with Anthony Basilio, who shared strategies from his time at The San Diego Union-Tribune

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