Empower community voices

Welcome to February’s Need to Know Special Edition, which features voices from news leaders on ways they train, partner with and convene community members to let them shape and tell their own stories.

When local newsrooms give people the tools and platforms for creative storytelling, they’re also building trust and supporting the creative and cultural health of their communities. News leaders have an opportunity to identify and create more on-ramps for both storytellers and new audiences, while creating an opportunity to embrace the roles of conveners and facilitators, not just documenters, in their communities.

We heard many ways newsrooms are doing just that at our API Local News Summit on Inclusion, Belonging and Local Leadership in October. We gathered news leaders in Washington, D.C., who spoke with one another about ways they are training and making space for trusted messengers to tell their stories in nontraditional ways that also showcase the arts, humanities and cultures unique to the community being covered.

That’s what David Chrisinger aims to do with the writing seminars he runs for The War Horse, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to reporting on the human impact of military service. These convenings are more than just workshops, he’s come to realize — they’re a powerful way to bring community expertise into the newsroom in ways that strengthen local reporting, deepen trust and widen who feels seen.

By partnering with teachers, editors and writing mentors embedded in the communities that newsrooms hope to serve, he writes, journalism can build pathways for people with lived experience to join the civic conversation. Chrisinger wrote for API about what this approach offers community members and newsrooms alike. You can find his full essay here.

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