Nonprofit Spotlight: Local Journalism Initiative

BY AMANDA SCHIMMEL

A new age of media consumption is upon us, calling for innovative solutions that cater towards alternative news platforms. Although 2024 marks the official start of Spotlight Delaware, CEO and Founder Allison Taylor Levine first began laying the organization’s groundwork in 2019.

While still in her previous role with the Delaware Community Foundation, Levine secured the funds to create the Local Journalism Initiative, a new 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization, and run a full ecosystem assessment to determine what Delaware’s community needed most from its local news sources. “Once we had the ecosystem assessment under our belts, we had the voices of the community and the data behind us to continue our mission,” reflects Levine.

What the research revealed was astonishing: a lack of local news directly affects community and civic engagement. Fewer people run for office, join civic groups, contact elected officials, and vote. Moreover, misinformation, political polarization, and bias grow after people are forced to shift their immediate consumption to national news outlets. Levine adds, “Journalism is just a mechanism for getting people inspired and empowered with the information they need to effectively participate in our democracy and to build social connections in our community.”

Driven by the research and information gathered from the community, the Local Journalism Initiative created and launched Spotlight Delaware, the state’s first community-powered, collaborative, nonprofit newsroom. Spotlight Delaware has a team of reporters and editors covering public policy issues and their impact on Delawareans, sharing their reporting for free through their website (www.spotlightdelaware.org), newsletter, and social media. The real magic, however, lies in partnerships with both legacy newsrooms and nontraditional sources of information. By sharing the information through these platforms, Spotlight Delaware can inform and engage more people in more communities.

“If a newsroom is already serving a certain community and we give them a Spotlight Delaware story, then it means that group now has access to local news and information that they didn’t have before,” Levine explains. “We have to communicate with them through different platforms, through different languages and cultural contexts, and through different media. So that’s what we’re attempting to do with Spotlight Delaware — to go where people already are.”

The nonprofit is also creating a new network of nontraditional information sources, leveraging different social media platforms, church newsletters, and more. For example, the Haitian Creole community in Delaware largely communicates through WhatsApp, so the big question to ask is, “How can we build relationships with the people who are leading those group chats to reach the Haitian Creole community?” By tapping into these different media to share critical civic information, the Local Journalism Initiative is effectively closing the information gap.

For Levine, success isn’t measured in views or clicks, but rather in the level of engagement with each article’s call to action. “We have a box at the top of every story that says in a couple of sentences why Delaware should care about this issue at the individual level. We also have a call to action included in as many articles as we can. If there is a legislator who is particularly influential over a decision, then we are going to provide that legislator’s name and contact information for our readers,” Levine elaborates. This way, their readers are encouraged to participate without being pushed to accept a certain narrative; they ultimately decide how to approach the call to action.

“If we want Delaware to thrive, we need communities that are well informed and engaged in our civil society as well as in our community,” Levine finishes.