Big Local News at Stanford University and Charlottesville Tomorrow show how local newsrooms can build trust and sustainability by prioritising community impact, transparent innovation, and mission-driven reporting
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Between shifting revenue sources and waning audience attention, the local news sector is under fire.
To help local news outlets thrive, a recent report by FT Strategies, The Local News Playbook, developed in partnership with the Knight Foundation in the US, outlined best practices from news outlets across the pond.
Sustainable local news organisations thrive when they reflect, represent, and serve their communities with news they can use.
This approach, however, often runs counter to traditional newsroom metrics and operational models. As Angilee Shah of Charlottesville Tomorrow explained in a webinar by FT Strategies, many modern newsrooms focus on efficiency and scale, seeking to use AI to reduce headcount, but community members value connection, local hiring, and visible investment in their lives.
“Our main metric of success for our organisation – and this goes from our board through to every person on our team, through to our partnerships, through to our community – is: does the communities that we serve have more power in their civic lives because they engage with us?”
A practical example is Charlottesville Tomorrow’s housing resource guide, which was created in response to direct community need. The guide aggregates hard-to-navigate public resources for people in a housing crisis, providing tangible civic value, even if it’s not the site’s top traffic driver.
“Does that serve scale? No. Does our community value that and want that? Yes, 100%, they do,” Shah said.
Building direct, two-way relationships with audiences is essential for sustainable local news. This means prioritising owned channels like newsletters and events over social platforms prone to volatility, but also giving community members a stake in editorial coverage.
Community listening projects, surveys and in-person events are all proven methods to generate trust, accountability and even more powerful reporting.
Phillips, of Big Local News at Stanford University, recounted a project on police use of force in Bakersfield, California, where follow-up community engagement led to a bigger story about how police deal with people suffering from poor mental health.
Financial resilience in local news comes from a balanced mix of revenue streams —audience revenue, advertising, events, philanthropy, and services. Philanthropy should be catalytic, not a crutch.
Charlottesville Tomorrow is a non-profit that seeks donations and subscriptions from its community. It receives funding from local philanthropists and national and regional grants. In turn, it hires and contracts as much of its work as possible within its community, trying to build wealth, knowledge and skills within.
Shah called on funders to stop thinking short-term and project-based: "Make a longer commitment as much as you can".
Your mission and values should guide everything you do, with a clear long-term plan, decision-making that includes everyone, and responsibility shared across the team.
Charlottesville Tomorrow’s mission and values centre around in-depth reporting and analysis that improve local decision-making and community inclusivity.
Community-oriented mechanisms and governance are vital to keep the organisation accountable to its mission and to ensure that every decision and metric match its core users. This includes an impact tracking dashboard and community board members. Shah says:
We track all the things that many newsrooms track. But the question is, is it in service to that impact goal that we have, our mission of helping our communities be stronger through information?
Successful local news organisations use technology and data to work smarter, serve their audiences better, and make a bigger difference, innovating in ways that are open, responsible, and right for their community.
Big Local News at Stanford demonstrates this approach by building AI-powered tools with transparency, verification and real-time fact-checking at its core.
A key example is a partnership with four major news organisations in California to create a searchable database of police use of force and misconduct.
"We could not have done that work without AI. It would have been impossible to parse through all of these PDFs and pull out the names of officers who used force without using a large language model," says Phillips.
The team performed entity extraction - an AI technique that automatically scans large volumes of text to identify and classify key information – to search for a particular officer, which was then verified by a human.
Big Local News has also developed Data Talk, a tool created with Monica Lam, a computer science professor at Stanford. This tool allows users to query campaign finance data in plain English and receive answers with both simplified and technical code explanations, plus direct links to the underlying data tables for real-time fact-checking.
"The more we build in kind of those transparencies so that trust is front and centre, I think that that's what we need to do," says Phillips. "And the more we can build tools like this that can be used and modified, customised by a local news organisation for a local news organisation, the more success we'll see and more sustainability."
Check out the full webinar below:
This article was drafted by an AI assistant with lots of human prompting, before it was edited by a human
