PIO ToolkitLighthouse for Public Safety
Intermediate
3 hours

Your Organization as a News Source

Your Organization as a News Source
$69USD

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About this course

A practical, self-paced course on running your communications office as a reliable local news source: the publishing systems, writing, distribution, audience building and editorial standards that residents can count on.

The council votes on Tuesday night. Ten years ago a local reporter would have been in the room and written it up for the morning. In a growing number of communities that reporter has gone, and the only full account of what was decided, and what residents need to do, is the one your team publishes. Pew Research Center's data show more Americans now get local news from local government than from the daily newspaper, while Northwestern University's Medill project counts 50 million people with limited or no access to local news.

This course is about doing that job deliberately and well. It covers what the research actually shows and what it means for your role; how to build an online newsroom, an editorial calendar, templates and an approval process that keep you publishing through busy weeks; how to write news items that lead with what matters to residents; how to distribute one story across the channels you own and the ones you don't; how to grow a readership that includes the residents your channels currently miss, including through language access and accessibility; and how to write editorial standards that protect your credibility when the news is bad for your own organization.

Every lesson is built around real, sourced cases, from Meta's news block during the 2023 Yellowknife wildfire evacuation to the Hillsborough Independent Panel's findings, and includes a practical exercise for your own organization. The Newsroom Setup Workbook turns the course into a month-long build plan, and the Communications Audit Workbook helps you see where you're starting from.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government communicators in communities where local news coverage has thinned or disappeared
  • Communications teams that publish regularly but struggle to stay consistent or to reach beyond the same engaged residents
  • Solo communicators who want a realistic publishing system that doesn't depend on heroics
  • Communications leaders who need to make the case for editorial standards to their leadership

Read a sample from this course

Nobody is coming to the council meeting

The council votes on Tuesday night to change how trash pickup works across half the city. New days, new bins, a new fee for bulk items. Ten years ago a reporter from the local paper would have sat in the second row, asked the finance director two awkward questions afterwards, and written 600 words for Wednesday's edition that most households would have seen by the weekend. This year there's no second-row reporter. The paper went to a weekly, then to a website that mostly runs wire copy, and the person who used to cover city hall now covers three counties from home.

So on Wednesday morning, the only full account of what the council decided, why, and what residents need to do differently is the one your team writes. If you don't write it, there isn't one. Residents will piece it together from a neighbor's post in a community Facebook group, a confused thread on Nextdoor, and whatever the bin crew says on the day.

That's the situation this course is about. Not a theory about the future of media, but a practical shift that has already happened in a great many communities: the government organization has become one of the main places people get local information, whether or not anyone inside the organization decided it should. The question for communicators isn't whether to take on that role. It's whether to do it deliberately and well, or by accident and badly.

This lesson sets out what the research actually shows, what it means for your job, and why the role brings responsibilities as well as opportunities. The rest of the course is the operational side: the publishing infrastructure, the writing, the distribution, the audience and the editorial standards that make a government news source worth trusting.

Keep reading — this course continues with 5 more lessons and 47 more sections.

What you'll learn

Explain, using current Pew Research Center and Medill data, how residents' sources of local news have shifted and what that means for your role.
Build an online newsroom that serves as the single source of truth, with records and ADA accessibility requirements designed in from the start.
Plan an editorial calendar at a sustainable capacity, with templates, tiered approvals and a minimum viable issue that keep you publishing through busy weeks.
Write news items that lead with what matters to residents, translate numbers into real effects, and report difficult news plainly.
Distribute one master story across owned, rented and offline channels, and audit which channels are worth keeping.
Grow an email list and community partnerships that reach the residents your channels currently miss, including through language access and accessibility.
6 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.Nobody is coming to the council meeting
  2. 2.What the research actually shows
  3. 3.When the platform takes the news away
  4. 4.The opportunity and the responsibility
  5. 5.What being a news source actually requires
  6. 6.What to check this week
  7. 7.From support function to local information service
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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