Local media companies are invited to apply to the Audience & Community Futures Lab, a seven-month program that helps newsrooms grow their audiences, deepen community ties and get ready for what audience engagement looks like next. Led by Local Media Association and Local Media Consortium, the Lab builds on years of work helping local publishers strengthen first-party data, grow registered audiences and better understand who their readers are.

Up to 20 newsrooms will be selected for the Audience & Community Futures Lab, which runs from December through June. Each participating newsroom joins as a two-person team: newsroom or organization leader and a content or newsroom executor. Audience engagement isn’t a strategy that lives in the front office. It lives in daily decisions about what gets covered, how it’s shared and how the newsroom listens. Lasting change takes the people who run the newsroom day to day, so both team members attend sessions together and carry the work back into their operations.

No two newsrooms get the same program. Every coaching session in the Audience & Community Futures Lab is built around your publication: your audience, your community, your capacity and your goals. Sessions are designed with today’s realities in mind, from how AI is reshaping the way people find and trust information to the pressures facing civic life and local democracy. This isn’t a generic curriculum. It’s a roadmap for what audience engagement looks like next, shaped for the community you serve.

What your newsroom gets

Each newsroom receives one hour per month of individualized coaching with a dedicated program manager, plus monthly group meetings with other peer newsrooms and open office hours every other week. Every newsroom starts with audience baseline assessments, so coaching targets real gaps from day one. Three hands-on playbooks guide the work, one for each of the Lab’s tracks: Content & Operations, The Community Connection, and Digital. Benchmark reports at the start, midpoint and end of the Lab show what changed.

Curriculum: Three tracks, built around your newsroom

The Lab is organized around three tracks. Working with their coach, each newsroom chooses a primary track based on its biggest opportunities, sets goals and builds launch projects to match. Newsrooms ready for more can take on additional tracks as their capacity allows. Every track asks the same practical questions: Do you have the people and resources to sustain this work? And how does it strengthen your bottom line?

I. Content & Operations: The engine of your newsroom

Everything starts with how your newsroom runs. This track audits your operation for 2027: how stories are chosen, produced and presented, and whether you’re giving your community the content it actually wants. Teams work through how to engage readers more deeply while still filling the paper and meeting editorial needs. Some stories may need to become video. Others need a new format entirely. This track also covers your newsletter: how to grow it and how to make it something special for the people who open it every week.

II. The Community Connection: More than a media outlet

Local media outlets aren’t just newspapers, nightly news programs or radio stations anymore. They’re cultural and community institutions. This track helps your newsroom fully embrace that role. Teams explore partnerships with libraries, bookstores, museums and other cultural institutions. They can also establish a community connector inside the newsroom: a dedicated role for building relationships, showing up and bringing residents into the work. The goal is a newsroom that can activate its community whenever and wherever it needs to.

III. Digital: Making your free throws

Growing a digital audience is won in the daily work, not the occasional big shot. This track looks at how your newsroom tells its story online, from website best practices to a sustainable social media plan. It also covers how AI search tools find and surface your journalism. Teams build the consistent, everyday habits that compound over time.

Whichever track you choose, your launch project is built with your coach from January through May and presented at the June showcase.

Program schedule

November: Collective of 20 newsrooms selected in late November

December: Kickoff and audience baseline assessments

January through April: One hour per month of individualized coaching to help each newsroom develop and refine its audience strategy, plus a monthly group meeting with the full Collective

May and June: Continued coaching, final assessments and a showcase where newsrooms share what worked

Playbooks and training

February: Content & Operations playbook, plus a Knowledge Session on how AI search and large language models find and surface local content

March: The Community Connection playbook

April: Digital playbook

How to apply

Community-based, locally controlled news organizations producing original local journalism at least weekly are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to news organizations that demonstrate:

  • Strong local leadership with deep community ties.
  • A record of serving their community through high-quality local journalism.
  • A commitment from both the publisher and a content or newsroom lead to attend all sessions and lead change inside the organization.
  • A readiness to rethink how the newsroom works, not just add new tactics on top.

Applications open Wednesday, Oct. 21.

Click here to apply.

For more information, contact David Stuckey at david.stuckey@localmedia.org