In March, the American Press Institute launched a community dinner for our audience of news leaders and product thinkers. We wanted to create a safe and joyful environment for people to connect with us at API to talk about the challenges their newsrooms face around understanding or serving their audiences and how that spurs product decisions and impact measurement. We decided to piggy back this dinner on the Online News Association conference since many journalists already attend and look for meaningful chances to connect with colleagues and peers. Their ideas and conversations, we hoped, would feed new community connections, future collaborations and feedback on the work we do at API to better serve the journalism industry. 

Many of the attendees filled out our post-dinner survey in which 100% of respondents said they felt “more hopeful about the future of journalism” after this interaction with API. We also received comments like this one: “Thank you SO much for bringing such an incredible group together! Tonight’s dinner was by far my most productive & fruitful ONA experience so far. Grateful for you and the whole API crew!! Feeling very lucky to be in your orbit.”

Overall, our goals of getting people to connect and enjoy a good meal were met! Attendees were exchanging contact information, scheduling lunches and figuring out ways to work together or collaborate in the future. We also learned that the restaurant we chose, even though we had a dedicated space, was still too loud to foster table-wide conversations we had planned in advance. Instead, we saw our attendees first organize into 1:1 or small group conversations and then work their way around the table to meet everyone. Serving the food family style also fostered more sharing. If we were to give some advice to others, we would encourage community listening in advance to help facilitate conversations and curate a strategic guest list. We would absolutely do that again! If we were to change anything we might try to find a private room to avoid restaurant background noise but otherwise we were very happy with the place and how our guests interacted with each other and with us.

Contributed by Liz Worthington

Cite this article

Worthington, Liz (2026, June 2). American Press Institute. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/american-press-institute/