Tucson Spotlight asked residents: What news do you want to read? Here's what they found

A Tucson-based news outlet spent several months asking its community what they wanted to read about, and what issues they thought were important.

Among the results: more coverage of housing and homelessness, roads and infrastructure and immigration. And, readers said they want solutions-based reporting.

Caitlin Schmidt is co-founder, editor and publisher of Tucson Spotlight, which conducted the survey with the help of a grant.

She spoke with The Show about the finding and started with what the thought process was behind asking the community what it wanted, what it didn’t want, what they were thinking.

Full conversation

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: Yeah, so back in, I want to say 2020, when I was working at the Arizona Daily Star, I created a solutions journalism beat there and launched it with basically a listening session project similar to this. And we surveyed people around the community, trying to get ideas of stories, trying to get ideas of, you know, problems that they wanted to learn more about solutions to, etc., etc. And that went really well, and it was very helpful in guiding how we set up that beat and what we did with it.

So, after we launched Tucson Spotlight and I heard about this grant, it seemed like a great opportunity to really build our newsroom around what the community said that they wanted and needed.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so what did the community say they wanted and needed?

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: Yes, they wanted more news and better news. The biggest complaint that we had from people about, you know, why they maybe weren’t accessing the news, was that it made them feel hopeless and it was too negative skewing.

So, very quickly, you know, I mean, we we started getting those answers like in the first round of surveying, and so we very quickly adjusted our editorial strategy to ensure that we were never running just only hard news stories on a single day. So, we would always couple a hard news story with either a solutions piece or a news feature or a story about somebody doing some good in the community.

So, it was a good way to kind of build our processes and teach teach our team, you know, really what what folks felt like they weren’t getting, and people responded very favorably to that. So, that was I think our first big takeaway was, you know, it’s not that people didn’t want to consume the news or that they were driven away by paywalls. They were driven away by the content because it just felt too dark. And I think we all in the news industry, it feels like we’re drinking from a firehose every day, and so we don’t want our audience feeling that way, too.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so how do you try to balance that between the news that, you know, the hard news that, you know, can be a little bit unsettling or upsetting or depressing, but, you know, is also important to for readers to know versus the stuff that will, you know, make them feel good?

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: Yeah, I mean, and that’s the beauty I think of solutions reporting is that it’s not fluff. They’re not puff pieces, you know, they’re not it’s not junk news. It’s, you know, deep investigative reporting about the responses to social problems. So, people are learning as they’re consuming the news, they’re getting the information that they news that they need about the problem, but they aren’t getting, you know, beat over the head with it over and over again.

And when it comes to some of these problems like homelessness and climate change, I mean, I think everybody knows that’s an issue, um but what they don’t know is what people are doing to try to address it in different parts of the community.

MARK BRODIE: Were you surprised at how often the issue of housing and homelessness came up?

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: You know, I really was not. I think, you know, it’s for for anybody that covers local government or follows local government or, you know, state or federal government, I mean, I think that’s issue is at top of mind right now.

We have a growing population of unhoused people and it’s not the people that we used to see be unhoused. It’s people who are a paycheck away from losing their homes or being evicted. So, I wasn’t surprised, but I was surprised to see that that really it transcended demographics. Like every age group, um every group that we talked to, homelessness was the top answer. So, I think it just shows how widespread of a concern that that is in our community.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I want to know if you think that sort of speaks to maybe the concern that people have or at least the awareness that people have about what a big issue that is.

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: I think so, definitely. I mean, you can’t ignore it if you’re out in public. It’s, it’s a reality that’s on many street corners in the community and when you’re confronted with it in your face every day, I think people really have a desire to know what the people that they elected into office that were paying taxes to, what, you know, what they’re doing to solve these problems.

MARK BRODIE: I’m particularly interested in what people told you about their use of social media for getting news, in the sense that it wasn’t necessarily because they thought it was the best source, but it was almost just like the easiest place to find it.

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: Yeah, I mean, and yes, definitely. And that also kind of transcended generations, too. The social media users weren’t just, you know, confined to the younger generation. We had people of all ages answering that question.

I mean, I think part of it is ease of access, right? If you’re going on Instagram or or Facebook or TikTok to check in on your friends and family, why not follow some news outlets too and get some news while you’re at it. I think, you know, everybody’s getting news on social media, whether or not you want it. Even if you don’t follow news outlets, somebody in your feed is probably sharing it.

So, we have always been really social media forward from the start at Tucson Spotlight. We are just very aware that there are people that are never going to watch a TV news piece or they’re never going to go to tucsonspotlight.org or pick up a newspaper. And so we want to make sure that they have access to the information that they need to know, that is fact-based and accurate.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. So, how do you expect that the results of this survey will inform what you do going forward and how you do it?

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: Yes, I mean, so one of the questions that we had asked people was, you know, what what were problems that they wanted to learn more about. And so, we we definitely will invest more resources and more staff into some of those topics.

But we also got a really great list of story ideas. One of the questions that we asked was, you know, who do you know that’s doing great work in the community, and we came to have a great list of of groups and individual people so that we can, you know, shape some coverage around.

And, I will say, people, you know, as we’ve gotten these story ideas and we’ve produced the stories and we’ve shared them back with the person or the people that give us the idea, they’re usually very grateful. You know, it’s nice to know that when you’re talking to someone, they’re actually listening and they maybe will do something about it.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Caitlin Schmidt, co-founder, editor, and publisher of Tucson Spotlight. Caitlin, good as always to talk to you. Thank you.

CAITLIN SCHMIDT: You too, thanks, Mark.

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