Spotlight Delaware

Allison Taylor Levine, Founder & Publisher

October 30, 2024

Developing sponsorships: How Spotlight Delaware has developed a model for mission aligned branded content

Spotlight Delaware in the small eponymous US state has a newsroom of six journalists and a mission to empower communities through independent journalism. Core to its mission is to do a lot of what the publisher calls Community Listening – to identify needs and service gaps among underserved local communities in particular. Spotlight Delaware has recently extended this effort to its branded content program, looking for sponsors who are aligned with a particular local need, e g job training programmes or child care, and want to sponsor content on that theme. As a result, both the journalism and the branded content cover stories of deep interest to the readers of Spotlight Delaware, building brand and underpinning its mission.

Presented by Allison Taylor Levine, Founder & Publisher

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By Cecilia Campbell

Article Summary

Spotlight Delaware, a nonprofit news outlet launched in March 2024, aims to empower local communities through independent journalism. Founded by Allison Taylor Levine, a former journalist and community advocate, Spotlight Delaware's mission is deeply rooted in Community Listening, engaging with marginalized groups to understand their news needs. This approach helped the team identify gaps in local coverage, particularly regarding government accountability, education, and land use.

The publication targets two key audiences: historically underserved communities (including Black, Brown, Spanish-speaking, and LGBTQ populations) and local policymakers, community leaders, and nonprofits. Spotlight Delaware produces responsive journalism that empowers readers with actionable information, such as including calls to action in articles. Additionally, the outlet offers Mission Aligned Sponsored Content, collaborating with organizations to produce branded stories that address local needs, such as job training or childcare.

The sponsored content model connects sponsors with local communities in ways that foster trust, providing information and resources while maintaining editorial independence. Spotlight Delaware's approach shows how community-centered journalism can thrive through deep engagement, building both trust and support in underserved communities.

Spotlight Delaware is a non-profit organisation and its journalism is free.
Spotlight Delaware has an editorial team of six, and with that is one of the biggest newsrooms in the state. There are four further employees on the business side.
Spotlight Delaware collaborates with other newsrooms in the state, sharing all the content produced, ultimately helping to get more high quality local news and information to more audiences who are consuming news through different platforms and products. “And we're also helping these other news organisations to become stronger. They can sell advertising, they can sell sponsorships, they gain subscribers and donors against the content that we provide. So we believe this is lifting the whole ecosystem,” said Allison Taylor Levine
There are 5,700 newsletter subscribers and about 36,000 unique monthly visitors to the website.
There are more than 250 founding members (people who donate, whether it's $1 or $1,000 or $10,000)
More than 200 articles published
Hundreds of Delawareans have participated in civic activities.

The intersection of journalism, democracy and community

Spotlight Delaware is the newest news publisher we’ve featured at an Innovate Local webinar (and also the first one in the US) – the website was launched on March 1 this year. It was born out of the passion and hard work of its founder Allison Taylor Levine, who has a long background in journalism as well as in building community and democracy working for the Delaware Community Foundation. “My passion has always continued to be the intersection of journalism, democracy, and community, how those three really interact and work together.”

After the life changing event of the passing of her husband (an editor at a local Gannett newspaper), Allison decided to reassess her life. “I realized I had a great opportunity to do something wonderful for my community. And it prompted me to start talking with people throughout the state and throughout the country about what might work for Delaware, what might work for my community. And I just gradually started building.”

Allison spent about three years building a business and operations plan, a sustainability model, and doing the fundraising to create Spotlight Delaware. In January she left her job at the Delaware Community Foundation. “We launched our full website on March 1st of this year, with a mission of empowering communities through independent journalism. We want people in Delaware to have both the inspiration and the information they need to participate in our democracy. Since the launch, it has grown faster and more powerfully and more excitingly than I had even hoped for. So it's been a great ride so far, and we've only been doing it for seven months.”

An audience of two parts

A key piece to understanding the mission and work of Spotlight Delaware is the audience they serve. There are two primary audiences. “One part of our audience is very much about people who have been historically underserved and underrepresented by the media. In Delaware, that typically means a lot of black and brown people, Spanish-speaking people, and people in the LGBTQ community. The other component of our audience is largely policymakers, elected officials, community leaders, nonprofit executives, and similar.” These two parts of the Delaware audience are key to how Spotlight Delaware came to develop their Mission Aligned Branded Content – I’ll come back to this.

Building on Community Listening. A k a User Needs!

As I was discussing this case with Allison, it became clear that, in addition to the topic of the webinar, the story of Spotlight Delaware has another strong theme running through it, and that is User Needs, a hot topic in the news industry. And it strikes me that, while many publishers are sort of playing catch up and only now beginning to work with user needs as their editorial starting point, Alison actually did it the other way around. The whole process of creating Spotlight Delaware started with listening to the community and finding out their needs.

“We built the vision and the plan for Spotlight Delaware on very intensive community listening. Over the course of about six to seven months, we listened to approximately 300 people throughout the state, digging deep into some of these historically marginalized communities to make sure that we heard from a variety of people.”

Allison and her team carried out a series of different activities to listen to people and learn about their local news and information needs, what they wanted, what they were interested in, and what they felt was missing.
– One-on-one in-depth interviews
– Focus groups
– A text message survey “to gather information from some of the harder-to-reach voices who wouldn’t typically take part in person”
– Analysis of public data sources, including on housing purchases and 911 calls “to find out what kinds of questions people were asking, what kinds of things they were looking for help on”

“Ultimately, what we learned from this study was that there was a very strong desire for more local news and information in our community."

People called out several qualities:
– They were looking for news organisations to work together more effectively. They wanted us to be collaborative.
– They also were asking for a non-profit model. “Of course, they didn't necessarily know the terminology because these were lay people, not journalists we were talking to. But they were telling us they understood that having profit as part of the motive in local media was sometimes problematic.”
– They felt that current media was not very focused on actually serving and addressing the needs of the community.
– They wanted to be more involved.
– They wanted it to be more community-centric.
– They were saying that local news is just downright depressing, “What I actually heard them saying, though, was that they were looking for a sense of agency. They didn't want us to just tell them about all the problems. They wanted us to tell them what they could do to make their community better, to make their democracy stronger. So we lean into the quality of empowering news, news that provides agency.”

The study also showed that there are three key issues that people felt they needed more information about from the local journalism ecosystem: Government accountability, Education and Land Use, “and how these decisions are being made and the impact they have, both or many factors, environmental impact of development, impact on the infrastructure that we have, on our tax systems, on our transportation systems, on our healthcare systems.”

The answer: a community powered newsroom producing responsive journalism

“As the needs of our readers evolve, we will continue to be in tune with our community. So we like to refer to ourselves as a community powered newsroom.” Over the past few months, the newsroom has engaged with more than 500 Delawareans, leading 25 community conversations, including some in Spanish and some in Haitian Creole. Out of those activities, the team gathers information about the interests and the needs of community members. “We try to respond to those needs and wants by producing journalism that is responsive. So out of the sessions we've held so far, we've produced more than 12 articles based on ideas from these sessions. We're learning a lot about our community and we're also building a lot of trust.”

Putting stories in context and providing “links to take action”

In order to provide readers with agency and be inspired to act, Spotlight Delaware’s articles always include a box which explains why Delawareans should care about the story; how it affects them. “It's just two or three sentences that says before you read this whole story, why should you care if the city of Wilmington invests $10 million in this new building? What does that matter to you?”

Later in the story, there’s a button that has kind of a call to action that tells people how they can express their views and how they can actually make a meaningful difference. These typically are links, buttons that empower the person to send an email to the legislator or the policymaker who is making this decision or driving this decision, or it might allow them to sign up to volunteer for an activity. See image below:

Business model and Sponsored content

Spotlight Delaware has multiple revenue streams because they are still in startup mode. The vast majority of the money comes from institutional philanthropy, meaning big grants from foundations and corporations. There’s also a membership program, where people are asked to donate – some people donate $2 a month. Some people donate $10,000. “We also host events and we put sponsorships on these events to use those also as a revenue stream. The events kind of crossover into both mission and money because part of our mission is to foster nuanced civil discourse.”

And then there’s the Sponsored Content – and the model for this goes back to the two parts of the audience which I mentioned at the start of the blog. Spotlight Delaware calls their model Mission Aligned Sponsored Content. This means that they seek out partner organisations that have information that communities need and want. “One of the things we heard loud and clear during our research was that Delawareans know that resources are available, that Delaware is blessed to be a fairly resource rich state. There are opportunities for people to access help with healthcare, with childcare, with transportation, with housing, but they don't have the information about how to get to those things. So part of our goal is to try to connect those dots,” said Allison.

Spotlight Delaware acts as a sort of marketing agency for their sponsors. Many of these are nonprofit organisations or government agencies or private companies that provide services and resources that the community needs. Together they discuss the messages that the client wants to communicate, and help them develop a kind of a marketing strategy. “I'll sit down with them and say, let's come up with five journalistic story ideas which will help you communicate the message and that will also be good stories that people want to read instead of just a boring advertising language.”

The branded content stories are written by marketing writers who actually act like reporters. “They interview the people, they put a face on the story. They will often talk to a person who has benefited from the services that they received from the sponsor. And then we have it written into a beautiful journalistic article with a nice photograph that helps a lot.”

The model works well because Spotlight Delaware have the trust of the local communities. “If clients are trying to serve low income audiences, or if they are trying to reach Spanish speaking audiences, for example, they know that we have access to those communities so we can help them with that distribution. So the benefits to the community of doing this Mission Aligned sponsored content is that we're providing essential information that isn't exactly news.”

“Our clients are telling us that they're finding our marketing services, our sponsored content, to be very effective because Spotlight Delaware is already a highly trusted source in the community.”

I realize that this non-profit case is different to how most local media work, and certainly that not everything Allison talked about would be applicable to traditional news media. However, I believe there is a lot of food for thought here, particularly around how you build trust in the community by listening, responding and creating journalism that produces a sense of agency with its readers – and value for sponsors.

Useful links and contact information

Here are links to presentation and Spotlight Delaware:

The webinar presentation can be downloaded here.
Allison Taylor Levine can be reached on allison@spotlightdelaware.org
Links to Spotlight Delaware: Editorial and example of branded content

You are welcome to contact the WAN-IFRA Innovate Local team, if you have questions or examples of similar cases.
Cecilia Campbell: c.campbell@wan-ifra.org
Niklas Jonason: n.jonason@wan-ifra.org