American Journalism Project
The American Journalism Project is the first venture philanthropy dedicated to local news. We partnered with the AJP on website strategy, UX design and content strategy.
Collectivist(s)
Jessica Gilbert, Abby Reimer, Hadley Allen, Morgan Johnson, Jason Haile and Steffie Drucker.
Year
2025-current
Development partner
Climber
We began working with the American Journalism Project in 2025, six years into the organization’s work. The AJP already had a strong brand identity, but the existing website did not reflect its current strategy or widespread impact.
We audited the current design and reimagined the site navigation and IA to align to AJP’s core operating principles. We also designed a new set of flexible website templates and patterns, working within the existing brand identity while ensuring visual elements — like color — worked within a larger strategy.
With this foundation set, we worked closely with the American Journalism team and their development partners (Climber) to migrate the site from an old, rigid Wordpress theme to a flexible, Gutenberg authoring experience. We’ve continued to work with the American Journalism Project to push out new features and updates, both front-end facing updates and ‘behind the scenes’ SEO and AEO strategies to introduce more people to AJP’s work.
“I’m very pleased with how things turned out, and all of the work that went into this website. The Composition Collective team was very helpful in walking us through the whole process, and doing so in a comprehensive and collaborative way.
They took the time to understand our team and our work, which I think was really important – their perspective helped shed light on some of the gaps in our storytelling or messaging, which was invaluable. We’re excited to continue working with them as we keep building on this great foundation that we’ve set.”
Roshni Neslage, American Journalism Project Head of Communications
We worked to transform the ajp.org from a static, beautiful brochure to an actionable digital product that reflected AJP’s ongoing impact in the local news field and communities across the U.S.
When the American Journalism Project launched in 2019, there wasn’t as widespread an understanding of the local news crisis and its impact. That’s started to change, thanks in part to AJP’s work. Our goal with the updated site was not just to articulate the challenges within local news, but the success stories from AJP’s portfolio newsrooms and beyond.
Spotlighting the growth in local news, not just the crisis
Fighting Conway’s law
Conway's Law holds that digital products often mirror the org chart of the organization that built them — producing websites that makes sense internally but not externally. We rebuilt AJP's navigation, templates and components around its key audiences instead, organized by three verbs: Build, Grow, Catalyze. Our goal was to answer "What does AJP do?" — not just "What does AJP believe?"
Building a strong content foundation
AJP's previous website relied on inflexible templates and manual curation. Content was split across the site and Medium, without a cohesive taxonomy or SEO strategy. We partnered with the AJP team to define a content taxonomy aligned with refreshed UX strategy and site IA, enabling the team to move from manual curation to automated, real-time connections across the site. We're now building on that foundation to strengthen AJP's presence and reach across platforms, including AI interfaces.
Integrating impact, everywhere
The American Journalism already produces a thorough, data-rich impact report every year. The organization has a well-articulated impact framework and a nuanced approach to capturing quantitative and qualitative data. We infused all that great impact information throughout the site, from the homepage to individual program pages.
Crucially, we wanted to make space for quantitative proof points and qualitative stories of community impact from AJP’s portfolio newsrooms — the many ways in which local journalism improves real people’s lives. Impact is nuanced.