How community listening and research inform The Lenfest Institute’s work to serve the Philadelphia news ecosystem

April 8, 2025

This post is part of “Building a Thriving News Ecosystem,” a series from Knight Communities Network, a Lenfest Institute community of practice for local funders creating thriving news ecosystems.

Funding local news ecosystems comes with a fundamental challenge: knowing where to begin. With so many problems to tackle — from under-resourced newsrooms and coverage gaps to misinformation and underserved populations — deciding where to focus your time, effort, and money can feel overwhelming. The impulse to dive right in and fund the most pressing needs is understandable. So is the temptation to take a slow, strategic approach, building resources and refining plans before making grants.

We recommend a third path: Invest in community listening and research and swiftly turn those insights into action.

To effectively support a local news ecosystem, you first need to understand your community’s news and information needs along with how well the landscape of existing news media meets those needs. From there, you can strategically use philanthropic funds to begin to address those gaps.

Since its founding in 2016, The Lenfest Institute has conducted three major community research studies to assess Philadelphia’s diverse and changing media landscape. To promote transparency and help guide other local funders as they begin supporting their own news ecosystems, we’re sharing a detailed look at these studies — including costs and how they’ve informed our programming and grantmaking.

“We try to be very research focused,” Shawn Mooring, Head of Philadelphia Programs, explained. “We want to work off of reliable data so that we can better understand how people are perceiving and understanding the news.” Those results “help us determine where we need to be investing,” he added.

Here’s how we’ve done that.

Being Informed: A Study of the Information Needs and Habits of Philadelphia Residents 

Our first Philadelphia media landscape analysis, published in August 2018, shaped many of the Institute’s early programs and initiatives. The study captured diverse perspectives across age, ethnicity, and income, with a focus on potentially underserved groups. Here are the details:

Quick stats

• Partnered with: Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania
• Conducted by: SSRS, a local survey and market research firm
• Method: Eight two-hour focus groups with eight participants each (64 individuals total)
• Cost: $95,000
• Time: Roughly seven months, from executed contract to findings publication
• Download the full report, which includes helpful discussion guides

Key insights

• Information gaps for Latino and Black communities: Participants of color highlighted significant information gaps about issues affecting Latino and Black communities, such as high maternal mortality, cultural celebrations, and the impacts of gentrification.
• The importance of representation: Participants emphasized that they trusted journalists who looked and sounded like themselves. This insight is particularly important in Philadelphia, where roughly 40% of the population is Black and 15% is Hispanic or Latino.
• A call for community-centered news: Participants expressed a desire for more local news that authentically represents Philadelphia’s diverse communities and highlight how those communities shape the city’s identity.
• Transparency builds trust: News organizations and individuals who made their funding and revenue public, cited reliable sources, and operated with transparency consistently received more positive responses.

Impact

• The Lenfest Next Generation Fund: Launched in 2019 to support professional development of emerging journalists of color.
• Lenfest Constellation News Leadership Initiative: Created in 2020, the fellowship aims to advance BIPOC leadership in Philadelphia media.
• Diversifying our own leadership: Acknowledging gaps in representation, we’ve diversified the Institute’s own Board and staff. In 2025, more than half of the Institute’s Board are people of color, a shift from 2019, when two-thirds of the Board was white. However, our staff diversity has remained largely unchanged, at about two-thirds white in both 2019 and 2025. We acknowledge the need to do more to build a more diverse team at all levels of the Institute.
• Operating with transparency: Each year, we publish impact reports detailing how donors’ support makes our work possible. We also list current donors, Form 990s, and grantmaking commitments on our website. Although we’ve publicly shared financials from the Institute’s start, learning how much Philadelphians value transparency fuels our efforts. 

The News Philadelphians Use: Analyzing the Local Media Landscape

Our 2023 landscape analysis, The News Philadelphians Use, surveyed just over 1,500 Philadelphians about the most important issues facing their neighborhoods. Researchers also analyzed more than 60,000 articles from 86 local news sites to assess the topics covered and locations mentioned.

Quick stats

• Co-funded with: The Independence Public Media Foundation
• Conducted by: University of Texas at Austin, Center for Media Engagement
• Method: Comprehensive media landscape analysis covering every Philadelphia zip code, mapping media organizations and funding distribution
• Cost: $337,000
• Time: Roughly 16 months, from executed contract to findings publication
• Read key takeaways

Key insights

• Heavy reliance on television and social media: Television (69%) and social media (68%) were the most common sources of local news for Philadelphians.
• Coverage gaps and disconnects: The study revealed disparities between the most populous parts of the city and the areas most frequently covered by local news. While 34% of residents identified sanitation, trash removal, and cleanliness as important issues, these topics appeared in only 3% of the analyzed articles.
• Community perceptions: Residents across Philadelphia rated local media as mediocre in representing their neighborhoods. Specific areas — Southwest Philly, North Philly, Lower Northeast Philly, and West Philly — expressed their view that coverage of their neighborhoods was overly negative.
• Desire for better representation: People in Southwest Philly expressed the most negative perceptions of how the media views their neighborhood. However, they also showed the greatest interest in engaging with local journalism, including volunteering to report on public meetings and speaking with journalists.
• Lack of solutions-focused reporting: Many residents felt that local media did not offer solutions to problems facing their communities. This sentiment was especially strong among women, young Philadelphians, and Republicans.

Impact

• Every Voice, Every Vote: This research informed the development of Every Voice, Every Vote, our flagship program aimed at reaching every neighborhood in Philadelphia with essential news and civic information. By bringing together newsrooms, community organizations, and residents, the program seeks to amplify community needs and voices, making media and city officials more aware of residents’ needs and priorities.
• Partnering with social media influencers: Through Every Voice, Every Vote, we collaborate with social media influencers to distribute news and civic information. “It’s a different way of getting news and information out,” Mooring said. “We want to make sure that it’s not just hitting the usual suspects.”
• Sharing takeaways: The findings of this study — as with all our research — were shared with local news organizations to help them better understand community needs. While we do not dictate editorial decisions, we ensure these insights reach the journalists and newsroom leaders shaping local coverage.

What Philly Wants: The Every Voice, Every Vote Survey of Philadelphia Voters

Commissioned in 2023, the Every Voice, Every Vote Survey of Philadelphia Voters is a cornerstone of the Every Voice, Every Vote initiative. By combining traditional public opinion polling with a collaborative, community-centered approach, the study highlights the firsthand perspectives of Philadelphians, centering the issues important to voters, rather than focusing solely on the “horse race” of candidates.

Quick stats

• Conducted by: SSRS, a local survey and market research firm
• Method: Surveys of 1,247 Philadelphia residents via online, mail, and phone in English and Spanish
• Cost: $250,000
• Time: Roughly seven months, from executed contract to findings publication
• Read a detailed analysis of the findings by The Philadelphia Inquirer

Key insights

• On the wrong track: Nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) said they believed that things in Philadelphia are “pretty seriously” on the wrong track.
• Top priorities for city officials: Respondents ranked their top priorities for Philadelphia’s mayor and elected officials to address in the coming years. The top responses were crime (89%), public schools/education (75%), the economy/jobs (65%), homelessness (59%), and affordable housing (57%).
• Voter knowledge gaps: While 85% of respondents were certain they are registered to vote at their current address, nearly half (45%) did not know their City Council representative.

Impact

• Guiding the mayoral election: The survey findings were central to the discourse surrounding Philadelphia’s 2023 mayoral election. As the Institute’s Executive Director and CEO Jim Friedlich noted, the results “became the lingua franca or common information currency of the campaign.” Every televised debate referenced statistics from the study, as moderators pressed candidates on how they would address the city’s most urgent concerns.
• Engaging the community: The poll’s results continue to guide the Every Voice, Every Vote coalition, which consists of more than 70 media and community partners providing multilingual, nonpartisan, issues-oriented journalism; community listening activities; public voter engagement events; candidate forums; and voter guides.
• Analyzing the results: Coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, WHYY, and The Philadelphia Tribune amplified the study’s findings, sparking citywide conversations about how to better engage Philadelphia’s diverse communities.

Tips for commissioning community-centered research

Whether you’re commissioning your first local media landscape study or launching a survey to assess community needs and priorities, research is essential.

Mooring noted that while the Institute wishes it could conduct research every other year “to keep things fresh and relevant,” the high cost is a barrier. This year, the Institute is investing in qualitative research, typically less costly than quantitative studies, by hosting focus groups and a virtual town hall related to Every Voice, Every Vote.

Here are some additional tips for supporting impactful research:

• Compare vendors: Explore options like local universities, community colleges, or market research firms with experience serving news organizations to find a partner that understands your community and fits your budget.
• Ensure accessibility for all residents: Be sure to reach a representative sample of people in your region. Additionally, remove potential barriers by offering multilingual surveys and providing transportation to focus groups when needed.
• Share findings widely: Collaborate with local media outlets and trusted influencers to distribute your findings. Organize meetings with newsroom leaders to discuss key takeaways from your research.

As Friedlich puts it, while formal terms like needs assessment, user research, or user-oriented design may apply, the true goal is “straightforward, honest community listening that can be applied to what to do next. It helps establish the need and to create a case for support for community foundations, individual givers, or other funders.”

In other words, listening and learning from the community is always the right place to start.

Resources

Want to gain a better understanding of your community’s news needs? Here are some helpful guides:

• Democracy Fund’s Guide to Assessing Your Local News Ecosystem.
• How the News Revenue Hub conducts landscape analyses.
• News and Information Ecosystem Playbook by Impact Architects.
• Civic Information Index from Listening Post Collective
• A guide to measuring community impact from The Lenfest Institute’s Statewide News Collective