There are a lot of reasons why many newsrooms are embracing a different approach to election coverage these days. With vast amounts of mis- and disinformation circling, voters don’t know whom they trust. And these days, it is rarely their local public media station or newspaper.

Public radio stations, like any media organization, can find themselves full of people working in silos. Here are some natural opportunities for collaboration between content and development on community engagement.

3 things to know about misinformation (and disinformation) during the 2020 election:

After back-to-back mass shootings, firearms are once again at the center of the national conversation. Inevitably, journalists across the country are writing and talking about guns. But do they know what they’re talking about?

It doesn’t take long for community engagement journalists to realize that we can’t reach our entire community by only providing content in English.

Whether it’s a listening session or one-on-one, heavy and divisive topics are hard to talk about. It’s important to approach these issues thoughtfully — transparency and empathy will go a long way in building trust. Here are some tips to help those conversations go smoothly:

Your newsletter strategy should dictate everything about your newsletter: the type of newsletter (prose vs. link heavy, number of content blocks), the data you collect, your engagement and loyalty building tactics, and how you approach monetizing your newsletter. In turn, the information, engagement and loyalty you create with your newsletter should cycle back to your newsletter strategy.

AP’s Local News AI initiative spent the latter part of 2021 receiving surveys from local newsrooms across the U.S. to understand tech capacity, concerns and reservations news leaders have. What we learned is that while our program has “AI” in the title — AI for artificial intelligence — more than anything what local newsrooms need are basic automations.