@samragland
VP, Journalism Programs at @ampress working toward a healthy news world for all journalists 💥🤌 | Former PBPost editor & Poynter faculty | amateur flower arranger 💐 | Need support? 📆 calendly.com/sragland/30
I've been building News Creator Corps, a new nonprofit on a mission to make social platforms safer for all by investing in content creators and community messengers so they can better share facts, debunk misinformation, and empower their audiences with information. newscreatorcorps.org
What if local influencers aren’t TikTokers, but pastors, organizers, & neighbors? At @ampress.bsky.social , @samragland.bsky.social is helping newsrooms rethink influence & rebuild trust.
👉 projectc.beehiiv.com/p/pastors-not-tiktokers-redefining-local-influence
🤔 Consider, then: How might you add a brick of belonging to your news organization's community — not just the external folks you serve but the internal ones, too?
Find more ideas and resources here: betternews.org/12-ideas-for...
🏁 For news organizations aiming to build belonging, even when it requires dismantling otherness, isolation and, yes, the status quo, these zoom-ins are a good place to start:
💖 Make Care
🌉 Connect + Collaborate
🌱 Prune, then Plant
🤝🏽 Share skills
🚧 Update your systems
👓 What you see is a thriving neighborhood. Each member contributes to the collective belonging and membership of others. Take it in and note the bottom squares, or "zoom-ins."
Yep, that is LEGO water and LEGO brick trees in the American Press Institute's newest local summit artifact: 🧱 "Building Belonging Brick by Brick."
Hugs and h/ts to the cohort for learning out loud: PublicSource, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, THE CITY (newsroom), WSOC-TV Eyewitness News, Factchequeado and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service 🤗
And a special s/o to Scott Klein and the team at the Knight Election Hub for powering this work.
Grab some ideas to steal here: americanpressinstitute.org/22-ideas-to-...
🥇 Influencers are still beholden to the algorithm
🥈 Not all influencers see themselves as such
🥉 Influencers value thought partnership
Read more here: americanpressinstitute.org/influencer-c...
As you consider how these trusted messenger or influencer collaborations may support your journalism, we hope you start where our learning cohort ended. Here are 3 big lessons after four months of experimenting with non-partisan influencer collabs:
👉🏽 This is why we often use “trusted messenger” instead — to encourage an extension beyond the confines of a social feed and follower count and into our real lives and neighborhoods.
📣 A note on influencer collaborations: We are not out to chase illusive virality. At the American Press Institute, we are most interested in this work to deepen community engagement practices and increase organizational capacity. americanpressinstitute.org/influencer-c...
Over the past year, a network of AI-generated local newsletters has quietly spread to 47 states and 355 towns and cities across the U.S.
For @niemanlab.org, I dug into Good Daily's operations and learned how it gained a foothold in "small town America."
www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/insi...
📣 In April, we’re packing up and heading to Nashville for our first API Local News Summit of the year on Local Identity, History and Sustainabily. 💃🏽
📝 Who do you know doing this critical, connective and energizing work? 👀👂
#APILocalSummits
americanpressinstitute.org/local-media-...
🤔 Who's doing community journalism right? Is engagement really sustainable? How does it help keep our doors open???
These questions prompted our director of community engagement @letrellcrittenden.bsky.social to write this case study on @publicsource.org.
americanpressinstitute.org/how-publicso...
Read the full interview here:
nclocalnewsworkshop.org/news-leader-... 4/
If you’ve wondered where’s the joy in local journalism, I encourage you to seek out the joy-full and talented Hannah Wise. She’s the kind of “yes, and” newsie so many of us need in our newsrooms, but also in our lives.
Over here thinking about how grateful my laptop will be when it gets shut all the way down tomorrow. Tabs and all.
Here for this:
“Ultimately, whatever it looks like, a need and desire for new, fact-based information is still out there. The challenge now is to work out which of the old models for delivering it still work—and at what scale—and which need reimagining.”
For many, this report confirms what they already suspected.
👉 If collab'ing with trusted messengers is already part of your content strategy, Ariel Zirlunick and I would love to hear from you further to inform our API influencer partnerships' guide: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
#APIguides
I love your career journey! And my favorite part: when you scooped me up for the ride 🤓
Me, just now realizing my toddler’s been turning the sound on his alarm clock off… no doubt bc 5 more minutes easily becomes 20 when Mommy doesn’t hear that life-giving, almost-bedtime “beeep beeep.”
Graphic illustration shows the hazards of journalism as yellow signage. These hazards contribute to personal betrayals of purpose, shown in a matchbox in the bottom right, which catches fire causing burnout as shown in a cloud of cynicism, exhaustion and ineffectiveness. To the left is a “toolkit” for workplace well-being, which includes a kaleidoscope to shift your perspective, a mirror to model healthy behaviors, a dictionary to have the right language and a ruler to measure success — all of which contributes to the fire extinguisher, which blows out the burnout. Illustration by artist Tina Marshall in Atlanta was designed to capture the conversations and feelings in the room during API’s Local News Summit on Mental Health and Sustainability in Oct. 2023.
EOY post to self (and maybe others): ☝️Tiny betrayals of purpose contribute to chronic stress which leads to burnout. ✌️Burnout has unique dimensions. 👉 Recommit to your purpose by setting boundaries, reducing access, basking in wins and treating rest as the human right that it is.