Start Small. Build Trust. Make News. Building a Small Newsroom People Trust

This session explores what it takes to start and grow a small newsroom that authentically serves its community with guest speakers from Shasta Scout, The Edge, and Riverside Record. Drawing from the experiences of journalists who have built newsrooms in diverse places, the conversation looks beyond content and into the relationships, decisions and trade-offs that shape local news from the very beginning.

At the heart of it all is trust: building a newsroom people see as accessible, relevant and worth paying attention to. Panelists will share how they reach audiences with different backgrounds and levels of familiarity with local government, how they lower barriers to understanding, and how they make their work part of the civic life of their communities.

The session also considers how new newsroom leaders learn to understand the civic and information landscape around them. Where are decisions actually made? How does information move through a community?…