Tucson Spotlight released its first Information Ecosystem Assessment today, the result of seven months of community listening that took the newsroom to book clubs, health fairs, university classrooms, conferences and the Tucson Festival of Books. The report documents what residents said they need, what's missing, and what local journalism and local institutions should do about it.

This report was made possible by a grant from the Listening Post Collective, whose Civic Media Playbook provided the framework, tools, and peer support that guided every phase of this research.

The LPC's investment allowed Tucson Spotlight to design and administer surveys across nine community events, host bilingual listening sessions, and synthesize more than 560 responses into this report.

The findings are clear and consistent across every demographic group surveyed: residents want journalism that is local, actionable, and solutions-focused. They want coverage that helps them understand how to participate in civic life, not just what is going wrong. They want journalism in Spanish.

And they want a newsroom that listens before it leads.

"This community showed up for us in a way that was genuinely humbling," said Caitlin Schmidt, Tucson Spotlight's editor and publisher. "More than 560 people stopped what they were doing to tell us what they needed. The least we can do is be honest about what we heard and hold ourselves accountable to it."

Among the report's key findings: homelessness was the single most-cited local issue, appearing in 52 survey responses alone; social media dominates news consumption but is driven by convenience rather than trust; and Spanish-language respondents, surveyed in their own language from the start, named entirely different concerns than English-language respondents, including infrastructure neglect and language exclusion from civic information systems.

The report also documents a finding that may surprise those who assume Tucson residents have checked out of civic life: they haven't. News avoidance in Pima County is driven not by apathy but by anxiety, a protective response to journalism that feels relentlessly negative and disconnected from anything actionable. When residents encountered Tucson Spotlight's community-oriented, solutions-focused approach, the response was consistently enthusiastic.

“When we don’t have community-focused nonprofit journalism, a lot of things slip through the cracks. Every city needs a newsroom run by members of the community, for members of the community," said Tucson Spotlight intern Ian Stash.

The full report is available to read here. Tucson Spotlight will host a community share-back session in the coming months to present findings, gather reactions, and discuss next steps with the residents who made this research possible.

Tucson Spotlight is a community-based newsroom that provides paid opportunities for students and rising journalists in Southern Arizona. Please consider supporting our work with a tax-deductible donation.