More than 1,300 newsrooms participate in the first 'Local News Day'

Every September since 2012, thousands of volunteers have come together around a shared goal: getting more Americans registered to vote. They’ve channeled attention and energy into a single day, dubbed “National Voter Registration Day.”

While having coffee with the founder of National Voter Registration Day, Montana native Matt Singer, Montana Free Press founder and executive director John Adams had a lightbulb moment: Maybe local news could benefit from that kind of national focus.

About a year later, that idea has become the first “Local News Day.” On April 9, more than 1,300 local newsrooms, around 200 partners, and 15 sponsors are participating in the “national day of action to celebrate and strengthen trusted local news and information.”

The initiative “isn’t about fundraising specifically as much as it is about drawing the public’s attention back to local news,” Adams said. An era of constant distraction tends to “pull our attention away from local,” toward platforms and national and international news. Local News Day is designed to show the public that local news is useful and relevant to their daily lives.

The requests to the public are straightforward: “Sign up to get an email. Tune in to your local public radio station. Subscribe to a local news source,” whether for-profit or nonprofit. Regardless of business model, medium, or definition of local, “if you’re producing local journalism, we want to bring audiences to your doorstep, and that’s really what Local News Day is all about,” Adams said.

The campaign is supported by the social impact agency Impactual, where Singer is a partner. Sponsors include Press Forward, The New York Times, BlueLena, Google, and WordPress and Newspack along with their parent company Automattic. WordPress built a database of local news organizations called the “Local News Finder.” (It’s also supported by Google’s mapping technology.) The database divides outlets by audience (local, regional, and statewide) and type (newsroom, broadcast, radio, podcast, newsletter, and content creator). Newsrooms apply to be included, and some press associations have applied on behalf of their members. This isn’t the first local news mapping project, and others have learned that creating an exhaustive database of local news sources is challenging, but Adams hopes it will eventually be “one of the most comprehensive resources for locating local news in the country.”

In early discussions of Local News Day, there was some concern about redundancy or competition with NewsMatch, the end-of-year fundraising campaign for nonprofit newsrooms organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News. Adams said his vision is focused more on attention and audience-building than on fundraising. He thinks the timing can complement NewsMatch; if a community member discovers a local news organization during Local News Day, by the time NewsMatch rolls around, they might be ready to donate. (Still, if my inbox is any indication, plenty of newsrooms are making explicit fundraising asks as part of their Local News Day campaigns.)

Suggested Local News Day actions for newsrooms include launching a new product, holding an event, or dropping the paywall for a day. Montana Free Press, for instance, is asking its most loyal readers to use a unique referral link to get others to sign up for Montana Free Press; if 10 people use their link to sign up, the referrer gets a custom MFP Local News Day Yeti tumbler. If 20 sign up, they also receive a tote bag. On Thursday evening, MFP will also hold a livestreamed local event highlighting some of its reporting on how federal immigration policy has played out in rural Montana. (Meanwhile, Axios reported that Nextdoor, a Local News Day partner, launched verified accounts for local journalists. Local news was central to the company’s redesign last year.)

The long-term goal is to identify and share some best practices for audience growth from the single-day experimentation of over a thousand newsrooms, Adams said. But for the largely volunteer team behind Local News Day — many, like Adams, running their own local newsrooms while lending their time to the national project — this year, “it’s a big push to get as many people participating as we can.”

The campaign aims to generate a million news subscriptions and at least 500,000 social media follows across platforms. It’s partnering with Junkipedia, a social media analysis tool, which will help measure the reach of Local News Day across the internet, and hopes participating news organizations will share their outcomes and experiences with the organizing team.

Adams is already thinking about future Local News Days: He said he envisions more centralized partnerships between the Local News Day organizing team and institutions like libraries and universities in “Phase Two.” For now, he’s excited by the scale of Local News Day and the conversation being generated already, including county, village (!), and state-level Local News Day proclamations.

Similar to NewsMatch, Local News Day organizers are offering promotional materials and messaging tips while also leaving room for personalization. Adams said organizers took Press Forward messaging research from last year to heart and are intentionally keeping their messaging positive.

“The narrative over the last 15 [to] 20 years has been decline, desertification, distress — it’s been this really negative narrative, and that’s turned off a lot of people,” Adams said.

“Everybody knows the old, tired story of ‘news industry failing’; we don’t need to continue to talk about that,” he added. “Let’s talk about all the good things that are happening and draw the public’s attention to something they can be a part of right now to build something new and exciting.”