How can we reach beyond the local news choir? Spotlight PA’s founding editor has ideas

As LinkedIn post ledes go, Spotlight PA CEO and editor Christopher Baxter’s on a post last week was intriguing: “I recently had lunch with a staunch, pro-Trump Republican and highly successful business leader, and his views on local news changed my own.”

In the post, Baxter, the founding editor of the six-year-old nonprofit local newsroom focused on investigative and public-service statewide journalism, goes on to describe how what began as a “sharply partisan” conversation uncovered common ground when it came to local news.

We started with national politics, and it was sharply partisan. He criticized some recent national media reporting as “psyops,” clearly read all news stories through the lens of each outlet’s opinion page stance, and he made clear he supports the president and many of his policies and initiatives so far.

But when we moved the conversation to his local community, the partisanship faded. He talked about working together for the good of all, seeking bipartisan input and creating forums for discussion, and he emphasized the importance local news must play in advancing those priorities. He even mentioned taking on the Republican leaders in his county over a policy issue many saw as wrong.

He wasn’t without his criticisms of local news, many of which are valid. He said not enough newsrooms understand their local and state economy, its health, and its drivers, and he, surely given his background, said there isn’t enough coverage and understanding of business, industry, and major employers. I added that we generally do a bad job understanding the military, too.

When we talk about “making the case for local news,” we have to understand we have many different constituencies who come to its importance from different directions. Right now, however, the vast majority of nonprofit newsrooms really only speak one primary, pro-Democracy language.

To be sure, that’s an important, if not vital, message. But it’s not the only one we can speak.

Many people who work in local media chimed in with their own perspectives.

In the wake of the 2024 election, where “democracy” was not a top issue for most voters, local news messaging focused on democracy may not suffice to build the broad coalition essential to give local news in the United States a sustainable future.

That raises the question about what messages might supplement or complement the democracy message. (Local news coalition Press Forward is currently message-testing to determine what works “to encourage a wider swath of people to support local news.”)

Next week, Baxter will speak on a Lenfest panel kicking off a series about making the case for local news. (The Lenfest Institute for Journalism co-founded and launched Spotlight PA.) In the meantime, I wanted to hear a bit more about how his thinking is evolving about different ways to make that case effectively.

Baxter doesn’t think local newsrooms should forgo democracy messaging entirely. “A lot of people respond to that,” he said. But he also wants to reach beyond the local news choir — and, in particular, activate the proportion of Spotlight PA’s audience who are engaged readers, but haven’t made the jump to become supporters. In Spotlight PA’s annual reader survey for the past two years, about 18 to 20% of respondents identified as somewhat or very conservative.

Not everyone comes to Spotlight PA’s journalism (or journalism writ large) in the same way: Some people may initially be drawn in by big investigations; others by lighter stories. “I think the same is true for donors,” Baxter said.

There are some topics and subjects “[many] newsrooms have never been comfortable with,” he added. “That’s limiting, because those topics and subject matter areas matter to a subset of the audience. And if it doesn’t feel like we know how to speak that language, they are not going to come to rely on us. Or, worse, they’re going to come to vilify us.”

Local newsrooms that are able to activate the “local psyche” rather than the national, partisan psyche have a better shot at supporting a substantive exchange of ideas, and bringing more people to the table.

Baxter told me about an exchange with an audience that might have tuned him out if the partisan psyche were at the fore. Last fall, he was invited to speak to the Republican Club in a wealthy retirement community in Lancaster, Penn. It turned out to be their first meeting post-election and he found “a party,” he said. “Balloons, very heroic videos of Trump playing on the big screen.”

Baxter proceeded to give his usual “stump speech” about Spotlight PA’s work and the values of journalism. He drilled down on conveying that “a lot of core values of journalism, particularly accountability journalism, are both wonderfully nonpartisan and bipartisan,” and discussed journalism’s constitutional role, injecting personal details about himself — his two kids and love of gardening.

“The reception was fantastic,” he said: Lots of questions, new donors, and new signups. Baxter attributed this partly to the magic of in-person gathering, where “the trust level is so much higher.”

“Some of it is just about understanding points of connection, the language we use, and what we’re doing on the ground for them,” he said.

A few other tips of Baxter’s when making the case for local news:

• Bang the drum constantly: “We are relentless in our messaging about who we are, what we’re doing, how it’s having an impact, why it matters, why people should care,” he said. “A lot of nonprofit newsrooms, and newsrooms in general, are still not good messengers…I still think there’s some hesitance or reticence among peers to be that aggressive in the messaging, and we really need to be.”
• Set expectations: Baxter likes to tell people, “You’re not going to like everything we do, and that’s O.K. — in fact, that’s good. Because if you were to read us and never disagree with anything we did, then it’s very likely we are not a nonpartisan source of news.”
• Bring people along, and say thank you: Baxter tries to begin every talk “by thanking people for taking time to think about the news” industry because most don’t. He discusses, beyond the financial strains and rapid-fire changes to local news, how “a lot of decisions our industry made along the way…had very predictable outcomes in terms of what we get.” A lot of people don’t know much about this history. That “helps you set the stage for how we’re trying to do things differently, and why we’ve oriented things the way we have, and why their support is important.”

Baxter’s post pointed to some other messages he’s workshopping; in his Sunshine Week column earlier this month, he included messages making the case for local news built around fiscal responsibility; personal freedom and civil liberties; the value of small-town communities.

“I personally have a concern that, especially within nonprofit news, we have built an echo chamber,” he said. “We could do a better job bringing some different people, perspectives, experience, diversity, into that conversation that would benefit us.”