Katie Oyan to lead Local News Success initiative

I am thrilled to announce that Katie Oyan has been promoted to Deputy News Director for Local News Success. Katie has been a stalwart and unflappable editor for the AP for many years, and she is perfectly suited to take on this new position. Local News Success is an exciting new venture for the AP and one that will be a pillar of the U.S. news report. Katie’s new role marks an expansion of the AP’s mission to help our members and customers succeed, through efforts like localization guides and the StoryShare platform. We also want to find new and creative ways to harness the expertise of AP journalists to assist and empower local newsrooms around the country and grow the AP’s brand in this space. Katie will now begin building out a team to carry out this mission, and she is eager to work with colleagues around the AP in making it a success. She will report to me.

Katie started her career at newspapers before joining The Associated Press in 2005 as night supervisor in Helena, Montana. She later moved to Phoenix to join the West Desk’s inaugural editing crew in 2009. She has since held various leadership roles on the desk and had a hand in many major stories, including the Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadly air race crash in Reno and countless natural disasters. She has guided enterprise packages on topics including drought, immigration and missing and murdered Indigenous women, and has been vital in shaping the AP’s coverage of Native American communities around the country. Katie is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the highest-ranking Native American leader at the AP. In March 2020, Katie helped launch a first-of-its-kind partnership with Indian Country Today, a nonprofit news outlet devoted to covering Indigenous affairs. She spent over 10 months there helping coordinate coverage, working with and coaching other Native American journalists, and shepherding stories to the AP wire. The partnership yielded coverage of the pandemic, the 2020 elections and the wide-ranging impact of George Floyd’s death on Indian Country. After returning to the AP, Oyan took on a new role late last year helping oversee West editing operations. Please join me in congratulating Katie.