Page 29 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2023

These are the issues that make it harder for businesses to attract and re- tain top-tier employees — particularly among the younger professionals every business community wants to attract.
In 2022, the Local Journalism Ini- tiative released Delaware’s Local News & Information Ecosystem Assess- ment: Key Findings and Opportuni- ties,1 a report on our comprehensive, community-centered research project that explored how Delaware residents consume local news and information. The study included more than 250 Delaware residents representing various geographic, socioeconomic, political, ethnic and gender diversities.
What did they tell us?
• Delawareans value local news and information, and they want and need more.
• Delawareans lack reliable, for- mal sources of local news and informa- tion. Most rely on word of mouth or crowdsource on social media.
• There are information deserts in the state — significant geographic areas that receive little, if any, media coverage.
• Delawareans say local news does not fairly represent all communi- ties, particularly Black communities, as well as politically conservative voices.
• Delawareans say local news is overly negative and disempowering. They want information that empowers them to advance solutions in their com- munities.
Over the past year, our board at LJI has been working on a plan to help ad- dress these key areas of concern. The result? Spotlight Delaware.
Spotlight Delaware
Spotlight Delaware’s name is an homage to the legendary investigative journalism team at the Boston Globe, best known for its reporting into the sexual abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church. It follows in the foot- steps of other nonprofit newsrooms — Spotlight Pennsylvania, Spotlight New
Jersey and Mountain State Spotlight. The intent is not to create another news organization to compete for what limited ad dollars remain in the state of Delaware. Instead, Spotlight Delaware aims to strengthen the quality of news and information in the places Delawar- eans are already going for their local in-
formation.
A new team of editors and reporters
is being assembled at this moment. The stories they write will be made available to any news organization in the state that wishes to partner with us. We will be additive, not competitive — taking on the stories and the topics that other newsrooms simply do not have the time or the resources to cover anymore.
We will focus coverage not on what generates clicks and views — a neces- sary reality of for-profit newsrooms — but on what Delawareans told us they lack. We will report stories from un- derrepresented communities, engag- ing in ongoing dialogue to make sure we’re covering the stories that mat- ter. We will actively seek out a kalei- doscope of voices and points of view. And we will strive to give readers ac- cess to the halls of power before deci- sions are made, so Delawareans have agency to make their voices heard when it still matters.
Addressing the Demand-Side Issue
Our belief is that Delaware will be a better place to live, to work, to raise a family and to do business when its people have access to trusted, inde- pendent, high-quality news and in- formation, wherever they may look for it.
But local news also faces a demand- side problem. Many people simply don’t look for the news, whether it’s because they find it over whelming, depressing, boring or even unfair or harmful to their communities. And that’s a serious problem we have to address as a community.
Not everyone is going to pick up a newspaper, turn on the radio at a designated hour, or navigate to a lo- cal news website to read the latest 2,000-word tome about education policy ideas at Leg Hall. To get more Delawareans engaged — particularly those who are disengaged from lo- cal news and civic engagement — we must go where they already are.
That might mean finding ways to get our stories into the pages of church bulletins, onto a local public- access television show ... or maybe even on TikTok. Spotlight Delaware is platform agnostic. We don’t care where people go for local news, as long as they get accurate, trustwor- thy information in a way they can use. And we’re going to partner with trusted sources throughout the com- munity to put civic information in front of our neighbors and engage more people in this crazy experiment we call democracy.
By not bringing ever yone to a single, central source for news, Spot- light Delaware will not be able to rely exclusively on advertising to pay its bills. We’re launching with strong philanthropic support from both lo- cal and national foundations, but phi- lanthropy alone will not bring news back to our state.
In fact, no single funding source is likely to be able to fund the news- room that Delaware needs. That is why we are pursuing multiple avenues for revenue — including corporate under writing, event mar- keting, and a membership program similar to those created by other digital news operations.
The Spotlight Delaware newsroom will launch in early 2024. Watch for the bylines wherever you get your news — one day, maybe even in these pages.
NOTES
1. https://ljidelaware.org/wp-content/ uploads/2022/06/report2022.pdf
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