Allison Taylor Levine, founder and CEO of the Local Journalism Initiative, shares her insights into building a nonprofit collaborative newsroom and the importance of local news to democracy. She discusses the challenges of launching the initiative in Delaware, from creating internship programs to fostering collaboration among local newsrooms. Levine highlights how Spotlight Delaware, LJI’s flagship project, focuses on policy coverage and public engagement to fill critical gaps in the local news ecosystem.
Levine also explores the role of community foundations in supporting journalism, explaining how these institutions can serve as partners, not just funders. She offers practical advice for newsrooms looking to collaborate with community foundations, outlining the importance of understanding their unique funding models and leveraging their strengths as conveners.
In addition to discussing the financial sustainability of nonprofit journalism, Levine dives into innovative revenue models like mission-aligned sponsored content. With her background in journalism, marketing, and philanthropy, she explains how storytelling and community engagement are central to the success of local news organizations.
Episode chapters:
(00:02:13) – Starting the Local Journalism Initiative
(00:04:30) – The role of community foundations
(00:09:33) – Convening and partnering with community foundations
(00:11:56) – The need for a new journalism initiative in Delaware
(00:18:38) – Engaging funders and explaining the importance of local news
(00:24:51) – Rehabilitating local news perceptions and reality
(00:31:17) – LJI structure and journalism as a dialogue
(00:34:43) – Collaborative journalism to strengthen newsrooms throughout the state
(00:41:19) – Building financial sustainability for LJI and sponsored content’s surprising role
(00:46:38) – Speaking the languages of journalist, funder and community
(00:50:19) – Rapid-fire questions
(00:58:02) – Media and local recommendations
Listen to the episode here:
Links:
- Allison Taylor Levine: Linkedln, Instagram
- Local Journalism Initiative
- Spotlight Delaware
- Mentioned
- Local recommendations
- Media recommendations
- Jessica Yellin’s News Not Noise
- The Second Mountain by David Brooks
- What is the What by Dave Eggers
- Local News Matters: web, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
- Pirate Audio
- Colorado Press Association: web, Twitter, Facebook
- Tim Regan-Porter: bio, Twitter
Bio:
Allison Taylor Levine, MPA, is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Local Journalism Initiative and its collaborative, community-powered newsroom, Spotlight Delaware. Allison is passionate about democracy, journalism and community. After starting her career as a reporter at several newspapers, she has spent the past 20 years in various communications and community leadership roles.
Full transcript:
(recorded via Riverside.fm; transcript automated via Castmagic.io, mostly unedited)
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:00:00]:Thinking about local news as a public good is new to funders. It is a new concept to a lot of philanthropists. I'm still a little bit amazed sometimes, but then have to remind myself some people are still not fully connecting local news to democracy. And that is something that we really have to step back. You know, those of us who are in the field, who are passionate about local news and information, who are passionate about journalism and democracy, we don't realize that this is a given to us. So we need to sometimes back up and explain this.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:00:44]: Welcome to the Local News Matters podcast, where we explore pathways to stronger journalism, better businesses, and healthier communities. I'm Tim Regan-Porter, CEO of the Colorado Press Association.
This episode, I talk with Allison Taylor Levine, founder and CEO of the Local Journalism Initiative and its collaborative community-powered newsroom, Spotlight Delaware. In our conversation, Allison shares insights into how the Local Journalism Initiative's projects—including internships, collaborative partnerships among newsrooms, and community listening tours—are designed to enrich public discourse, expand access to information, and ultimately build a stronger local democracy. Before founding the Local Journalism Initiative, Allison served as vice president of marketing and communications at the Delaware Community Foundation, and we discuss the role community foundations play and how newsrooms might work with them to meet the information needs of their communities.
If you like this episode and what we're doing more generally, please follow in your favorite podcast app, leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and tell your friends about us. This is a side project and a labor of love, and your support means a lot. You can find past episodes, full transcripts, and relevant links, and sign up for our newsletter at localnewsmatterspodcast.com, or for lazy typists like me at lnmpod.com. You also follow us on most social media channels @lnmpod.
And now I bring you Allison Taylor Levine.
Allison, welcome to the podcast.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:02:11]: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Starting the Local Journalism Initiative
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:02:13]: So why don't we start with just telling us a little bit about the Local Journalism Initiative and how it got started and its purpose?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:02:21]: Sure. Yeah. The Local Journalism Initiative is a 501(c)(3) that I started a few years ago. Initially, I started it as a fiscally sponsored project at the Delaware Community Foundation where I was working at the time, but it got bigger and bigger, and now it's a whole grown up nonprofit organization of its own. We started it to strengthen the local news and information ecosystem in Delaware to strengthen our democracy in our communities. And we have several streams of work. We have an internship program that actually grew out of some pandemic funding. We started an internship program with the goal of deepening the pipeline of reporters from historically underserved and underrepresented communities here in the first state.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:03:13]: We also did a statewide ecosystem assessment where we engaged with nearly 300 people throughout the state to learn about what they really want and need from local news, what could be done better, what was going well, what wasn't going well, etcetera. We also have the Delaware Journalism Collaborative, which is a convening of 23 Delaware newsrooms and community partners that are working together. That was originally funded through the Solutions Journalism Network, and that group spent the first two years doing a deep dive and leading community conversations around polarization. And now, as we approach the 2024 elections, they are working collaboratively to do voter education through a multi platform, multilingual voters guide, as well as to debates pre-primary, which is really important in Delaware. And then our flagship project is Spotlight Delaware, which is a new collaborative community powered nonprofit newsroom. And we're really focused on covering the impact of public policy on people's everyday lives.
The role of community foundations
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:04:30]: Prior to this, you were VP of Marketing Communications at the Community Foundation. Right? And I've talked a lot about community foundations on the podcast, especially now with Press Forward going. And, you know, before I got into to nonprofit journalism, I didn't really know much about that world, and I'm sure there are listeners who don't understand community foundations, why they exist, how they operate. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the Delaware Community Foundation, what its goals were, how it operates, and then why it thought this was a project that it wanted to sponsor.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:05:06]: This is a project that I sort of built in my spare time off the side of my desk, while I was working at the Community Foundation. The Community Foundation did give me a fiscal sponsorship account so that I could build the nonprofit organization, but it is a fully separate initiative from the Community Foundation. Community foundations are largely collections of donor advised funds. A lot of the money that is at a community foundation is in these donor advised funds, which means that individual donors have set up what are kind of like bank accounts and deposited money there and then they from that account, they can make grants. The community foundation staff itself doesn't have much influence over the majority of those funds. Community foundations, however, do have typically have some what they call discretionary funds and that is the smaller amount of money that the community foundation staff can use to try to drive change in its community. And the Delaware Community Foundation was really focused on building opportunity, which could mean a lot of different things, which is pretty typical at a community foundation. Community foundations don't usually take one or two specific things that they really try to focus on, rather they try to address a whole range of community needs and wants and gaps.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:06:45]: So the Delaware Community Foundation was working on all kinds of different things ranging from environmental issues to youth engagement to healthcare, to the environment, all kinds of different things. So that's kind of typical of what community foundations do. The Delaware Community Foundation President and CEO, Stuart Comstock-Gay, and I did a lot of work together around democracy-related initiatives, and that was part of his interest in allowing the Local Journalism Initiative to have a fiscal sponsorship account there. And the DCF continues to be a key funder of the Local Journalism Initiative now.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:07:31]: And, of course, you know, heads of community foundations tend to be very well connected in the community. So even if it's not a fund that they control, they're certainly helpful in understanding the needs of the community and who the players are and who might be interested in addressing certain needs in the community.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:07:49]: Absolutely. And community foundations, I talk about this quite a lot to different organizations around the country. Community foundations are not really the place that we as journalism leaders should be going for, expecting huge grants. You're unlikely in most community foundation communities to get a six-figure grant from a community foundation, and you're certainly not going to get sustained funding from a community foundation, but a community foundation is still a great resource in a lot of other ways. A community foundation is a great convener, a great partner. They can give you a great kind of good housekeeping seal of approval and endorsement for the work that you're doing. They get behind local news and information in different ways, but we need to understand the reality of what community foundations can and can't do. They can help you connect to funders, but a lot of people in the field are under the misimpression that if a community foundation has $300 million in charitable assets that, oh, well, they can afford to give me a million dollar grant.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:08:57]: No. Most of that money is controlled or, we should say, advised by individual donors who already have causes. And the community foundation is not going to just introduce you to all of their donor advised fund holders. That's part of the job of the community foundation is to serve as that buffer between grant seekers like me and donor advised fund holders who don't necessarily want every single nonprofit organization and cause coming knocking at their door.
Convening and partnering with community foundations
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:33]: Right. Absolutely. So I think that's very helpful for people to understand. And just to elaborate on your convener, I think that's an often underused function that newsrooms don't use and probably don't do enough convening themselves. But I don't know if Delaware participated in the On the Table initiative that the Knight Foundation led, may still be going on. Okay.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:09:57]: No. Delaware is not a Knight community, unfortunately.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:09:59]: Got it. Yeah. But community foundations were very involved in that across the country, mostly, as you say, in Knight communities, but I think they might have branched out beyond that. But, you know, that was a pure convening function, that Knight supplied a little money for. Newsrooms often weren't even at the center of this, but they certainly could be, to just get people in the community together talking about what's important to the community, what issues it wants to address, what strengths maybe are going untapped or underutilized. So I would encourage newsrooms to think of community foundations as more than funding, and as you say, it's not nearly that simple, but also as conveners. I think that's a good point.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:10:39]: Absolutely. And that's something that at Spotlight Delaware, community engagement is really at the center of the work that we do. You know, we do call ourselves a community-powered newsroom, so the community foundation can be a great partner for us in that work. And I think that is something that community foundations around the country can be doing in partnership with their local newsrooms. And vice versa, that local newsrooms, for profit and nonprofit, can be reaching out to create partnerships with community foundations. Because if there's one thing community foundations do really well in addition to managing the donor advised funds and charitable investments, they are great conveners. They're great, they're great at community engagement, and they tend to have, like a newsroom, they tend to have their fingers kind of all over the community in all different areas and issues. So like a newsroom, like reporters, they tend to know a little bit of everything about what's going on and who the people are, where the relationships are, where the people are in this, in the community who can really connect you and help you understand the depth of the issues.
The need for a new journalism initiative in Delaware
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:11:56]: Well, let's go back to the time when that was your day job and you decided to do this as a project. But what was going on in Delaware that you felt that there was really this need for this new initiative and eventually organization?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:12:10]: I think we can all look around the country and see what's happening to the local news and information ecosystem. It's not news that local news is in trouble, and that certainly was becoming more and more apparent in Delaware. I will tell you the personal part of the story. My late husband, my husband actually died in 2017, and that sort of shifted my personal perspective on things. And I think anybody who has experienced a loss like that knows that it makes you kind of reassess what's going on in your own life. And for me, it also caused me to reassess what was happening in my community. And Jason also was the editorial page editor at the local paper, so it really shifted the way I was looking at things in the ecosystem. What I saw was the local news and information ecosystem in decline as it has been around the rest of the country.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:13:14]: The News Journal, our local Gannett paper getting thinner and thinner, and the online content for, you know, at the risk of sounding print centric, it wasn't just about the physical paper, the content was getting thinner and thinner too. And then in 2019, with the Gannett and Gatehouse merger, that had a significant impact on the state of Delaware. GateHouse had a series of community papers throughout the state, including the Middletown Transcript, the Dover Post, Hockessin and Greenville Community News. And when Gatehouse and Gannett merged in 2019, those papers started to be deprecated. And some of that happened first in terms of stories just being regurgitated here and there, so instead of original content being produced in some of these smaller communities, it was just the same stories being run-in multiple places. And then gradually, more and more of those small outlets were just shut down until they were completely eliminated. So things were getting worse and worse in 2019, so that was when I really started looking around and saying what can we do about this. That also had given me a little bit of a space from the loss of my husband and getting my kids back together and gave me a little bit of a mission. So I worked with our community foundation president and CEO, Stuart Comstock-Gay, to pull together a group of funders to talk about the local news and information ecosystem.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:14:53]: Unfortunately, that conversation was scheduled for March 20, 2020, and the world kinda shut down about a week before that. And I said to Stu at the moment, I can remember saying it, Stu, even I can't think about local journalism right now. I know I can't get the funders to think about it. So we ended up postponing that conversation. And, then I actually got pulled in at the community foundation to leading our pandemic grants program for the state. So, you know, that kind of sort of, I thought, was putting things on hold for a year, but what ended up actually happening was through the pandemic grants process, it really ended up highlighting the community's need for better quality and more local news and information. We started, I was essentially receiving all of the grant applications from nonprofits all up and down the state of Delaware, and part of what we started to see was a lot of applications related to the need for people to have better access to local news and information. The grant making council determined that none of those applications were doing quite what we needed as a community, but they did see it as a need.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:16:14]: And what they said was, hey, Allison, we heard that you know a little bit of something about local news and information and journalism. We're gonna carve out a $25,000 grant and task you with going to figure something out. Here's $25,000 to do something good around local journalism. I've made some partnerships throughout the state and worked with some different folks to try to come up with some ideas. And that happened to be also right after the death of George Floyd. So the council had instructed me to also connect that to equity, to some kind of racial equity issues. So what we ended up doing was creating this internship program that was focused on increasing the coverage of the impact of the pandemic on communities of color. And we ended up funding interns to work throughout the state at different newsrooms.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:17:15]: And that program was very successful, so successful that I was asked in subsequent years to go do some additional fundraising to keep it going, because it was very popular and effective. And it it turned out to be a great thing. And it also turned out that that was kind of a silver lining that my funder convening had been delayed a year, because it gave me an opportunity to sort of prove the concept and bring it bring the issue of the importance of local news and information to communities, and put it in front of funders and show them that there were things that we could do as a community, that there are things that we can do as a community, and here's a proof of concept through this one $25,000 grant. Here's one small thing we can do in Delaware. Now we reconvened that group in April 2021, that same meeting we were gonna try to have in 2020, pulled that group together, had a very small proof of concept through that internship program, began the conversation more in earnest about what could we do for our local news and information ecosystem, why did we need to do this for our community, and created a vision for a path forward for for building up the ecosystem in Delaware.
Engaging funders and explaining the importance of local news
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:18:38]: Talk a little bit about that vision and the conversation you had with funders and maybe any—you know, as I'm sure there are ongoing conversations with funders and and lots of listeners are thinking about that conversation now. So what is the vision? What is the need and the opportunity? How do you convince funders to see that?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:18:56]: I'm a big believer in starting with why. Funding local news and information as a philanthropic endeavor, thinking about local news as a public good is new to funders. It is a new concept to a lot of philanthropists, and I'm still a little bit amazed sometimes, but then have to remind myself some people are still not fully connecting local news to democracy, and that is something that we really have to step back. You know, those of us who are in the field, who are passionate about local news and information, who are passionate about journalism and democracy, we don't realize that this is a given to us, so we need to sometimes back up and explain this. So that is exactly how I started that conversation with funders and with the funders in that April 2021 conversation, and I believe is why we exist today. Because what I did was I went through the data. I showed the funders, I showed the head of these foundations why, what happens to a community when local news is diminished. And I'm probably preaching to the choir here.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:20:14]: Your audience probably knows this, but we see taxes go up. We see government become less effective and less efficient. We see government salaries go up, and particularly, government, the salaries of government employees who are the highest paid. The wage gap in government workers widens. We see violent crimes cleared at lower rates. That's just a few examples of things that happen in terms of loss of government effectiveness and efficiency. We also see loss of civic engagement. We see fewer people turn out to vote.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:20:51]: Fewer people run for office. We see fewer people contacting their elected officials. And when they do contact them, the electives respond at lower rates. They don't call back as often. We obviously, we see exacerbation of inequities in communities. We see reporters in black and brown communities being pulled out first. We see worse coverage of communities that are low income communities or historically marginalized and underrepresented communities. Those are the communities where journalism diminishes the most, the fastest, and the worst.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:21:35]: We also see increased polarization. We see split ticket voting actually drop, because people just look at the R and the D, and because we don't have the local news to look at the nuances between the candidates, the nuances of the differences between the candidates and to really think about their policies, we just look at the national. And if you're a D, you're obviously the same as Biden, and if you're an R, you're obviously the same as Trump. So why even think? There is, in the absence of that local news and information, we look to the national to feed the, to fill the void, and national news is all about Rs versus Ds. So it really diminishes the community in a number of ways that are tangible, measurable, statistically significant, and that cross the spectrum of partisan interests. So if you are talking with a group of funders who happen to be of a more conservative leaning, there are plenty of arguments to share with them. There is a lot of data to show them that aligns with more stereotypically conservative values around government efficiency, government efficacy, small government transparency and accountability. And if you're working with a group of funders who are more traditionally left leaning, then there are lots of arguments to share with them too around the impact on historically marginalized communities, the need for narrative change, the need for nuanced stories about communities of color, about different communities, and about helping people to understand one another.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:23:26]: So starting with why and starting with data, starting with statistically significant information helps them understand why this is something that we need as a community, that we need to think of as a public good. We cannot just depend on the free market for this anymore, and we also need to share with them and help them understand why local news isn't fully supported by the free market anymore. There are quite a lot of business people I've encountered who are largely the those same as the philanthropists, who don't understand the economics of the downfall of local news. They think that Gannett just doesn't know how to run a business. They think that these newspapers just need to get their act together and figure out how to maintain their bottom line. But once you map out what has happened with the evolution of the Internet, the 24 hour news cycle, it becomes very clear to them why this is a business that no longer fully sustains on just free market forces. And if they understand why that's happening and why we need it as a community, then we can connect the dots to why they should be supporting it.
Rehabilitating local news perceptions and reality
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:24:51]: Yeah. I'm curious too whether you've seen, in different communities there, the need to almost rehabilitate the image of local news. You know, I've I encountered this, when I was back in Georgia where there were some who's who didn't understand the economic picture and whose perception was, in some cases, maybe a little outdated, in some cases, maybe well earned, but that their local media was somewhat exploitative, was, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. You know, there were stories about businesses or whatever that they didn't like. And so helping them understand that that sort of clickbaity stuff, I think, is largely going away or gone away. But, you know, there is all of this information that your local news outlets are providing. I'm wondering if you've encountered any of that sort of resistance or pushback or perception of local media as not necessarily being helpful to the community?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:25:52]: Definitely. And I would say I don't think it has gone away. I don't think that clickbaity stuff has gone away. I think that if it bleeds, it leads, it is still here, and we see that in a lot of media outlets. And that is part of our challenge. There are many funders at the local and national level who are very cautious about who they fund, what types of organizations they will fund, and often prefer not to fund a start up until they have seen it in action for about a year or two, because they are very concerned about inadvertently funding pink slime sites. They don't wanna be part of that clickbait. And I don't think it's an unreason—I don't think it's a misconception.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:26:39]: I think it's a reality that in a lot of cases, local news in its fight to survive has gone far too clickbaity, and the community sees that. And this is part of what we learned through our ecosystem assessment. The community in Delaware at least, I—you know, I've read a lot of studies from around the country, but mostly I can speak to what I know of Delaware. I was so pleasantly surprised. I was actually honored that lay people around our state understood that journalists need to get paid and that means there have to be advertisements, that somebody has to pay for the production of local news. And they understood the need for ads, but they did also specifically—a lot of people specifically asked us, and I'm talking about teachers and mechanics and doctors. These are, you know, people who don't know the business of journalism necessarily saying, is there a way to make it a, so that it's not so much about the profit. Is there a way to make it so that, like, the journalists are working together so that we don't have, you know, all 17 reporters covering one shooting and then nobody covering the state legislature? And what they were really asking us for, and I think this is true around the country, is they see that the business model is broken.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:28:03]: They understand that the way we have it right now, they were asking us, could we try a nonprofit model? And they were asking us, are there possibilities for journalists to work together? Are there possibilities of collaboration? Or could they in Delaware, Delaware is a pretty small state. We're only a million people. You can drive the whole thing top to bottom in about two hours. Could the journalists kind of break up the state and cover different geographic areas instead of everybody insisting on being a statewide news outlet, and then certain parts of the state not getting any coverage and the city of Wilmington getting so much coverage. But they you know, so there were really some interesting conversations and ideas coming from the public, and that's what we tried to do as we created the vision for our path forward is we took those ideas, those comments from the community, and married them with solutions and things, experiments that are happening around the rest of the country and came up with this vision for Spotlight Delaware, which is a nonprofit collaborative newsroom where we do have journalists working together and trying different things and also talking to each other. So that, you know, it's a little bit of a different way of thinking about it for journalists because—you know, I went to UNC Chapel Hill for journalism school. You know, I was trained in this very competitive journalism environment. But the kind of journalism that has really got lost is not the stuff that gets clicks.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:29:48]: People will click on breaking news. People will click on shootings and arsons, and that's part of our nature. We do click on that stuff. We do wanna see that stuff. But public policy is not so sexy. It's harder to get clicks on those things. So that's more of what we focus on at Spotlight is kind of the second day story. You know, we let everybody else go cover that shooting.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:30:14]: We let everybody else go cover the latest murder or whatever. And then maybe a few days later, we're gonna look at a trend story about public safety issues. Maybe we're gonna look at what are some gun reform issues happening in Delaware, or what are some of the issues that might have led to that kind of shooting? Are there some public policy issues? Are there some social ills? Are there some things that our legislature could be doing differently? And we're not gonna tell the public this is what we think should be done, but we do take a solutions journalism lens of looking around and saying, here are some things that are working in different communities or not working in different communities. Let's have a conversation about that. And while we're at it, here's the name of some of the legislators who are driving this kind of policy, and here's their email address. So you can call them and tell them what you think or email them and tell them what you think.
LJI structure and journalism as a dialogue
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:31:17]: Talk a little bit about the structure of Spotlight Delaware and how that works.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:31:21]: Sure. So, the Local Journalism Initiative is the 501(c)(3) and then we have multiple projects under that. Spotlight Delaware is one of the projects and it's the very biggest project. At Spotlight Delaware, we have an editor and we have just hired our fifth reporter who will be starting next week, so we'll have an editorial team of six. And then we have, by September, we're going to have five people in operations and one of those ops people kind of floats actually in editorial and ops. That's our director of membership and community engagement. The community engagement is really critical here, and that's why I say that person kind of floats across both because, yes, he is helping us build audience and building the top of our funnel. We have no paywall, so we depend on donations and we rely on him to help us get small dollar donations from the public. But the way we build the top of the funnel is by physically going into the community. We just completed a 12 session community listening tour, which included two sessions in Spanish and one in Haitian Creole. We are going to the parts of Delaware that are the least covered, the least heard from, the least represented, and trying to build relationships with those folks, which enriches the quality of our coverage and lifts up the voices and stories of these communities, while also helping us to build a very diverse readership, which is important to us. So our community engagement person spends a lot of time setting up these community events, but he's not the only one going to them because that's kind of you know, to put it in journalist speak, none of us as reporters wanted to talk to the PR person.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:33:17]: Right? We all want to talk to the boss. People in the community don't want to talk to our community engagement person exclusively. They want to talk to our reporters. They wanna talk to our editors. And frankly, our reporters and editors are the ones who need to be out there listening too. So we have really structured our journalism as a dialogue in Delaware. And I believe that's what journalism is in the modern sense. You know, we have really evolved as a field similarly to the arts, I think.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:33:52]: You know, it used to be that journalists, we would, you know, we'd sit in a room and decide what needed to be told to the community and we would tell them. And now it's much more of a conversation. We need to be listening and learning and promoting conversation, civil discourse with the community. So when we talk about community engagement here, we don't talk about doing community engagement in addition to our journalism. It is our journalism. So, yeah. So about, yeah. So six people on the editorial team and then the community engagement person who crosses over both.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:34:29]: We have a development director. We just hired a marketing manager who will be starting soon, and we are getting ready to bring in an operations director, and then there's me.
Collaborative journalism to strengthen newsrooms throughout the state
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:34:43]: And the engagement and the journalism that is produced, is freely available to the partners. Right? How do you disseminate information? Is it available to anybody who wants it or just people who sign up and commit to certain things? How does that work?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:34:59]: Well, we do have our own website and newsletters. It is freely available to everyone in the community who wants it. We don't have a paywall. I think you're thinking about our network of newsroom partners, and what we do there is, we are collaborative newsroom, so we're creating formal partnership agreements with newsrooms throughout the state. And what that means is that we share all of our content with those newsrooms, and in exchange for that, they, you know, acknowledge, of course, and give us an attribution. And then they also, we don't charge them money for it, but they do agree to give us a certain amount of advertising and cross promotion, and that is different depending on the outlet. You know, we don't expect the little one person newsroom down in Southwestern Delaware to give us the same as what the Anchor news outlet gives us, but we do want some level of contribution. And most importantly, when a newsroom signs on to be a partner newsroom with Spotlight Delaware, they commit to come to a monthly editorial meeting that's led by our editor in chief, Jake Owens.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:36:18]: And what that is is all the newsrooms send either their top news editor or a senior editorial staff member to participate in a monthly conversation about what the news needs are in the state. What does the community need that we're not getting to them now? Are there stories that we wish we could be doing, but we don't have the capacity to do them? Are there some trends? You know, we had an opportunity at the last meeting where somebody in the southern part of the state mentioned that they were working on a story related to utility rates, and somebody in the northern part of the state said, you know what? We're hearing a thing about that too. And it started to—it hasn't fully evolved yet, but we're starting to find that we can identify trends and opportunities for better stories that are more holistic and comprehensive. We're finding opportunities—for example, on the Spotlight staff, we have a Spanish speaking reporter, a native Spanish speaker in the small paper in the southern part of the state. They don't have a Spanish speaking reporter right now. So in some cases, maybe our reporter could help them out with a story if they need to interview some sources in Spanish or something like that. So we're looking for opportunities. You know, the Spotlight team, we sort of see ourselves as an extension of everybody else's staff to try to build up the capacity of all of those other newsrooms, as well as a convener and kind of a broker to help try to fill in gaps and maybe broker some partnerships among the newsrooms.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:38:04]: And all of this that we're doing from base at Spotlight, we hope is going to help strengthen every individual newsroom throughout the state. And by making their products better, that should help them attract more subscribers, more advertisers, bigger audience, and build up their bottom lines ultimately too, because what we're really trying to do is lift all boats. We're trying to strengthen the whole ecosystem here so that they can serve their communities as effectively as we know they want to.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:38:40]: And how many partner newsrooms do you have?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:38:43]: Right now, we have six throughout the state, and we're working on some more. We just launched on March 1st, so we're still building.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:38:51]: Yeah. And you alluded earlier to sort of the history of this field is not really collaborative, that, you know, people care about the, you know, competition and scoops and all of that sort of thing. Have you found, you know, in those initial partners, this was sort of a coalition of the willing, or was there a lot of baggage to work around and to, you know, help bring them on board?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:39:16]: Oh, there still is, and I think there always will be, you know, and everybody has feelings and sensitivities. Right? And, yeah, we're definitely working with all of that, but we've done a lot of groundwork over the years, and that I think is something that, you know— maybe your listeners will take heart that this is slow going. It takes a lot of time and conversation, and people's feelings get hurt, including mine sometimes. It takes a long time to build trust. We're constantly trying to reassure our partners, like, we're not gonna try to take your scoop. If you have a great story, we don't wanna take that from you. But if you could use a hand with it, we'd love to help you. And, partly being second-day coverage, I think helps to allay some of those fears, but there are still some folks out there who definitely see us as a threat, and I hope that over time that'll evolve, but that's okay.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:40:18]: We're working with what we have. We also did lay a lot of groundwork through building the internship program that I mentioned that we started in 2021. That was a collaborative program. That was the first time. We had four interns placed at four different newsrooms around the state. And when we constructed the model for that program, we made it a requirement that those internships, those interns had to be allowed to collaborate. That was the first time in Delaware newsrooms have collaborated. Then after that was done, then we created the Delaware Journalism Collaborative, and that helped build those muscles up just a little bit more. So by the time we were building Spotlight, folks were starting to get used to me talking about collaboration, and they weren't just laughing in my face anymore. They had a little bit of a sense of what I was talking about. So it's definitely taken a long time and it will continue to take time.
Building financial sustainability for LJI and sponsored content’s surprising role
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:41:19]: Talk to me a little bit about LJI's, financial plan and sustainability. How much is philanthropy and how do you diversify your philanthropy to sort of provide some long term sustainability? I do, I noticed you've got donate buttons on your website, so you are doing, you know, reader revenue. Yeah. So just what's the plan for, you know, financial stability?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:41:43]: Yeah. Absolutely. And like everybody else in the country, we're still figuring that out. That's, you know, I don't believe there is a magic bullet here. I think this is just gonna continue to evolve for all of us over time. When, you know, and again, we're pretty new, so we're still definitely building out what our sustainability model is gonna look like. Right now, it is largely philanthropic funding, because that's how a lot of us get started. Right? So we were very lucky to get a grant from the American Journalism Project and then we got a major local grant from the Longwood Foundation, which is the DuPont Family Foundation.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:42:24]: So those are sort of our two big core funders to get us off the ground, but both of those grants are gonna end, so we are building up our own revenue streams. When I created the initial business plan for this, I modeled it largely after the Texas Tribune. So we built the original model on philanthropy on five streams of revenue, five types of revenue streams. Philanthropy, meaning institutional philanthropy foundations, corporate underwriting, events, memberships, and major gifts. I have since collapsed a lot of those together. In Delaware, corporate underwriting and philanthropy are pretty much the same thing. And frankly, events, a lot of events roll into that too. So, and membership is coming along, but it is a tough row to get people to pay for news if they don't have to.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:43:30]: It is kind of the NPR model, in that way, so we are still seeking reader revenue that way. We're also finding a lot of success now, which I did not anticipate, with sponsored content. It was not something I was excited about doing at first, but we have created some very strong policies around what sponsored content can look like. And what we found is that because of the audience that we're building, we have, we're serving a lot of audiences that are historically underrepresented and under-resourced that need access to information about how to reach publicly available resources. And that is actually something they told us in our ecosystem assessment is we know the state has resources, we know there are small business loans, there are job training programs, there are childcare supports. We just don't have the information about how to get it. So what we're finding is that this—by creating sponsored content, what we're finding is that creating sponsored content allows us to provide that kind of information to communities that need it by creating a platform for government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and foundations that need a place to tell their stories. So we're really connecting some dots here by focusing on mission aligned sponsored content and then those dollars that come from that sponsored content are underwriting independent nonpartisan local news and information, and both of the players get excited about that too.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:45:22]: So the folks in government and nonprofit and foundations are very happy to spend their marketing dollars with us because they know that we are mission aligned, they know that we're a nonprofit, we're not paying for somebody's Ferrari with the profits from this. That money is going back into our organization to pay for reporters to cover the community, and that is also serving their interests. So it has turned out to be a real—I hate this hackneyed phrase, but it's turned out to be a real win-win for everybody.
Speaking the languages of journalist, funder and community
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:45:54]: And last last topic before we go into rapid fire, you know, you have a background in marketing communications as well as journalism, And I think a lot of people who haven't spent time in newsrooms or around journalists would think that, marketing and communications might come naturally, that we're, you know, natural storytellers. We don't like to talk about ourselves. And, you know, there's a beat structure that makes what we do talk about pretty narrow. And people don't understand what we do, why we do it, what we're about. So does that background that you bring now to LJI, can you talk a little bit about how that influences how you think about the organization, how you think about your communications?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:46:38]: Yeah. Absolutely. I do think that it's a real blessing. My, this is the convergence of my whole career path, really. You know, I did start my career as a newspaper reporter. I had wanted to be a reporter since I was 10 years old working at the Summers Elementary Scoop in North Central Florida. I wanted to hold power to account and follow the money and make sure the truth was out there, and I did that. As I mentioned, you know, I went to journalism school and I was a reporter, so I understand that world pretty well.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:47:17]: And then I spent a long time in government and nonprofit marketing and communications, including the previous 12 years in communications for philanthropy. So I like to say, you know, I speak journalist and I speak funder. And I love being—I love this role that I have. I feel really privileged to be kind of the bridge. And because I have been doing marketing and communications for so long, yes, absolutely, it helps me to be able to tell the story of our work as journalists and as advocates for democracy. There's a lot that I do not have experience in and do not officially know how to do, but boy am I learning on the job. You know, there are a lot of operational things and finance things and HR type things that I've had to kind of get with the program, but it definitely it definitely has been a path that, I think that the marketing the marketing background definitely helps me to make the case and then I can get a lot of smart people around me to help me with all the other stuff and that includes particularly, my editorial team who I just admire up and down the hills. So…
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:48:41]: And I think, you know, one of the things that's come through as you talk about what you'd, what the organization is doing, it's not just talking about what you do to the funders. It's also what you talk about and how you listen to the community. You know, often they don't understand what we do and we don't listen to them in terms of what they need. So I think the marketing and communication encompasses all aspects of that.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:49:05]: That yeah. Absolutely. And I think also, I have a real passion for community. I personally have a very small biological family, but Delaware, and I think people have this in a lot of communities, but I feel very fortunate that I have such deep community here and that's really important to me and I want other people to have that too. And, you know, in sort of academic terms and sort of fancy terms, we talk about that as social capital or social fabric. And I'm very passionate about how we can build that and help people, feel connected to one another and I think that is really the marriage of all the work that we do. And we talk about this in our newsroom that Spotlight is a little bit unusual because we are a newsroom, but we also operate kind of like a nonprofit organization. We are a nonprofit, but, you know, we spend a lot of time talking about strategy and community and mission. And it's, yeah, it's experimental, but so far so good.
Rapid-fire questions
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:50:19]: Alright. Now for the rapid-fire questions, and the questions are short, but your answers don't have to be. And I may even ask you to elaborate from time to time. So compared to a year ago, are you more or less optimistic about the future of local news?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:50:32]: Totally optimistic.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:50:34]: What gives you that optimism?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:50:36]: Oh, I actually gave a presentation about this recently at the Maryland, Delaware, DC Press Association. There are more than, I think it's 400, 440 nonprofit news organizations around the country that are part of INN. There are folks like us who are trying to build democracy from the ground up all over the place. I have never seen this evolution as the death or the decline of local news. I've always seen it as the evolution of local news, and I'm so excited that more people around the country have kind of embraced this as a change. We've got out of this whole, you know, the sky is falling, print is dead, oh, it's all the end of the world. And now we're moving past that and thinking about how people consume information and how they need it and want it, and I'm just excited about how we're growing.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:51:31]: Does AI fill you with more hope or dread when it comes to journalism?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:51:36]: Actually, neither. I'm completely neutral. I think AI is a tool. I think it's I think it's computer just like everything else and, it's just something that we we will work with and it's another thing where, you know, like like when the car was created or like when social media came out, we all thought it was gonna you know, the aliens were gonna take over the world and kill us all. It no. It's just an evolution.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:01]: Messy desk or clean desk?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:52:03]: It's kind of in between.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:08]: Do you have a favorite piece of advice that you've been given or that you like to give?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:52:12]: Yes. It was personal, but I find it useful in the professional world too. When my husband passed, I had a hard time at first accepting help, and my boss actually, Stuart Comstock-Gay, who I mentioned, he sat me down and said, Allison, when you let somebody help you, you are giving them a gift. And that freed me to allow people to help me, and I hold on to that to this day, letting people help you is giving them a gift.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:52:45]: Is there a piece of common advice or conventional wisdom that drives you crazy and it's oversimplification or just wrongness?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:52:53]: It'll all work out. That's the one that bothers me. Of course, it's gonna work one way, work out one way or another, but it's not that it's not helpful. It'll all work out.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:53:06]: Do you have a favorite failure of yours, something that maybe put you on a new path or was just a crucial learning experience?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:53:14]: I have so many failures that have been good learnings. I once lost a job because I was trying to help someone, and it just kinda turned out wrong. And, I look back on that, and, of course, at the time it was traumatizing, but I think in retrospect, my heart was in the right place. So I was trying to do the right thing, and it caused a lot of problems, but I—looking back, I was still, I was trying to do the right thing, and I'm okay with that now.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:53:49]: This is a hard industry. It's hard to be alive, sometimes, it feels like. We're talking days after the shooting at the Trump rally, and news media, sometimes, you know, journalists get caught up in not only covering it, but being the target sometimes of vitriol. And then just making it all work is challenging. How do you restore you know, how do you maintain your sanity or just kind of restore yourself?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:54:19]: I have two things. One is exercise. It seems simplistic, but I do really love to get caught up in an exercise-driven and adrenaline rush. I mean, and the other is just being with my—I have adult kids and just hanging out with my kids. They're good people and they give me some hope that maybe we're doing something right, maybe I did something right, I'm doing something right, maybe we're all doing something okay.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:54:49]: And as a leader, you know, I'm very worried about burnout in our field. As a leader, is there something you do or you'd recommend people do to help their staffs maintain some sort of equilibrium or mental health?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:55:03]: I insist on taking all of my PTO, and I insist that my staff take all of their PTO. Do not leave PTO on the table. That is like handing part of your salary back to your organization, and yeah. No. Take your time off. Go on a trip.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:20]: Alright. Do you have a favorite time saving hack?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:55:23]: I do calendar blocking, religiously. So I think that's really useful and it helps me avoid getting overwhelmed. I used to keep a to-do list, and it would get to four pages and I would throw my hands up in despair. And now I just kind of map out on my calendar. Okay. I need to review the development plan. I'm gonna do that 11 o'clock on Thursday, then I don't have to worry about why haven't I reviewed the development plan yet. Yeah.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:55:49]: Great. And do you just use Google or Outlook for that, or do you have a tool?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:55:54]: Nope. Just just on my calendar right there, you know, next to doctor's appointments or meet the kids for dinner or whatever it is.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:56:01]: Five years out, what does success look like for LJI?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:56:05]: Oh, gosh. We have big dreams, but I would love to see, I wanna build Spotlight really strong for Delaware, but as we are doing that, we are documenting our processes because I would like to then take this model after we've worked out a lot of kinks and take it to other communities that are similar to ours. And it's not gonna fit perfectly anywhere, but how can we take this collaborative community-centered model and help other communities tailor it to serve their communities too. So I think that's sort of the big vision. It may take more like seven years, I think, to really get us strong enough to where I can then start to do more work around the country. I'm doing a little bit now, but helping other communities to do this kind of work. You know, we also have a lot of other visions for the Local Journalism Initiative. We aspire to one day bring Documenters to Delaware. I would love to start an arts journalism initiative in Delaware, and we wanna strengthen our youth programs, But that's sort of the core of the vision is, let's make Spotlight strong and work out some of the kinks and build a sustainable model, and then take it to other parts of America where where communities need access to local news.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:57:39]: I really see this as a democracy movement. This is really about building democracy from the ground up because the top down doesn't seem to be working very well right now.
Media and local recommendations
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:57:50]: And then now for the final two questions, sort of the recommendations. So, someone who's visiting Delaware, what are three to five activities or places you would recommend?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:58:02]: Delaware beaches are spectacular, so definitely there. And, I love it's technically right over the border. Longwood Gardens is right over the border in Pennsylvania, but that is a favorite spot. And, I also love Lums Pond. Delaware has an unusually fabulous state park system, and Lums Pond is one of my favorite state parks.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:29]: Are there any holes in the wall or unique cuisines you would recommend?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:58:34]: My favorite is this little hole in the wall called Star of India in Ellesmere. Takeout only.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:58:42]: Great. And then final question, three to five pieces of media that you would recommend to the audience?
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:58:48]: Oh, I'm a big fan of Jessica Yellen, News Not Noise. I love The Second Mountain by David Brooks. I love the evolution in his story, the growth. And, my favorite book is, What is the What by David Eggers.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:59:08]: Alright. Well, great. Thank you very much for your time. This has been wonderful.
ALLISON TAYLOR-LEVINE [00:59:12]: Thank you. It was fun. Take care.
TIM REGAN-PORTER [00:59:17]: Thank you for listening to the Local News Matters podcast. Never miss an episode by subscribing in your favorite podcast player and sign up for our newsletter at lnmpod.com.
And thanks to our production partners at Pirate Audio. Pirate Audio believes every community deserves great things to listen to, and they're on a mission to help local newsrooms reach their communities via audio. If you're interested in starting a podcast or need production support for an existing one, let me know, and I'll be happy to connect you.
If you have guest recommendations, others doing interesting and innovative work in local news, let me know through the contact form at the website, lnmpod.com.
Past guests on the Local News Matters podcast include: Crystal Good (Black by God), Lisa Snowden (Baltimore Beat), Karen Rundlet (INN), Jim Brady (Knight Foundation), Candice Fortman (Exit interview, Outlier Media), Jean Friedman-Rudovsky (Resolve Philly), Jay Rosen (NYU), Sue Cross (Exit interview, INN), Mary Margaret White (Mississippi Today), Amy Kovac-Ashley (Tiny News Collective), Michael Shapiro (TAPinto), Kenny Katzgrau (redbankgreen and Broadstreet), John Garrett (Community Impact), Shannon Kinney (Dream Local Digital), Larry Ryckman (The Colorado Sun), Frank Mungeam (Local Media Association), Kelly Ann Scott (Alabama Media Group), Sara Lomax and S. Mitra Kalita (URL Media), Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro (National Trust for Local News), Mike Rispoli and Richard Young (via When the People Decide), Sarabeth Berman (American Journalism Project), Rabbi Hillel Goldberg and Shana Goldberg (Intermountain Jewish News), Lyndsay C. Green (via The Journalism Salute), Rashad Mahmood and Mark Glaser (New Mexico Local News Fund), Christian Vanek and Barbara Hardt (The Mountain-Ear), Dan Grech (BizHack), Zack Richner (Easy Tax Credits), Tracie Powell (Pivot Fund), Dan Oshinsky (Inbox Collective), Linda Shapley (via What Works), Yehong Zhu and Jake Seaton (Zette, Column), Charity Huff (January Spring), Joaquin Alvarado and Dave Perry (Aurora Sentinel), Steve Waldman (Rebuild Local News), Maritza Félix (Conecta Arizona), Michael Bolden (American Press Institute), Jeff Roberts and Corey Hutchins (CFOIC, Colorado College), Eve Pearlman and Erica Anderson (Spaceship Media), Jennifer Brandel (Hearken, Democracy SOS), Corey Hutchins with Bay Edwards, Todd Chamberlain and Raleigh Burleigh (Sopris Sun).
