While too many cooks might spoil the broth, there aren’t any idioms about the dangers of too many reporters.

Quite the opposite, actually.

Studies have shown that a lack of local news negatively impacts communities and results in lower voter turnout and more government corruption and political polarization.

Increasing a community’s access to local news provides residents the tools they need to be civically engaged and take action to address the problems in their lives and find tangible solutions.

But local reporting involves more than watching meetings and rewriting agendas. It’s critical that the people producing local news live in the community and can truly see, hear and feel all that’s going on.

It also means making the effort to engage with and report on — and for ——communities that have been historically underrepresented or misrepresented in the news.

Enter the Tucson Spotlight, a nonprofit newsroom that aims to shine a light on undercovered topics and communities. We’re committed to providing robust, community-based coverage and amplifying the voices of new, emerging and diverse journalists.

Our coverage will focus on the stories that don't make the news or that require additional context or information, with an emphasis on solutions journalism, local governments, education, sustainability and social services. We'll also report on politics and issues through the lens of the Hispanic community.

Tucson Spotlight is a member of the Tiny News Collective, which provides support for hyper-local newsrooms. The collective envisions a world where everyone has a role to play in creating relevant, accurate, and culturally-conscious local news and information, and we’re proud to be a part of this movement.

Spotlight might be new to the scene, but the people behind it are not. It’s founded by Caitlin Schmidt and Susan Barnett, two former Arizona Daily Star reporters who most recently worked with the Tucson Agenda.

After an out-of-state move by one of the Tucson Agenda’s founders meant that the outlet was no longer majority-owned by Southern Arizonans, Caitlin and Susan made the tough decision to leave and stay true to our belief in the importance of locally owned and locally reported news.

That’s why we took a leap of faith and launched Tucson Spotlight. But we’re not going it alone. We’re joined by a talented staff of reporters, including Angelina Maynes and Samantha Callicutt, who also worked for the Tucson Agenda, and Isabela Gamez, who spent her summer reporting for Voice of America.

Also joining the team are interns Olivia Krupp, Abbie Andrus, Lauryn Abozeid and McKenna Manzo, and you might see the occasional guest byline as we continue to grow our staff.

We’ll also be growing our multimedia and social media coverage, so make sure to follow Spotlight on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and even X.

We’ll share more about our team members and plans in our newsletter over the next few weeks, but we’re proud to say that a staff this size will allow us to provide comprehensive election coverage while also reporting on what’s happening in the region.

We’ll update our website daily with new coverage, but you can also subscribe to our newsletter for a daily dose of our work, opportunities to get involved in the community and standout reporting from other outlets.

We don’t believe that news should only be available to those who can pay, so Spotlight won’t have a paywall, which is why we need your support.

We have a small amount of startup funding, but we need the community’s support to make sure we can pay our interns and provide competitive salaries to the rest of the team.

Our membership with the Tiny News Collective includes fiscal sponsorship, which will allow us to receive tax deductible donations while we wait for our tax-exempt approval from the IRS. If you believe in the importance of local news, we ask you to support our work by making a donation here.

We’ll also be offering paid subscriptions for people who can afford to support our work, which will help us to keep our coverage free for those who cannot.

We look forward to contributing to the great local reporting coming from our hard-working colleagues, while also providing young journalists with the opportunity to showcase their work.

Today might be Spotlight’s launch day, but we’ve been hard at work for weeks meeting with candidates and attending events. You might have seen some of us out and about, and you’ll definitely see more of us over the next several months.

We’re taking a big risk here, but we believe it will reap even bigger rewards for the entire community.

We want the community to help guide our coverage, so we’ll be hosting in-person and virtual listening sessions over the next few months. We have plenty of stories in the works, but there’s always room for more reporting, so please take a moment and fill out this very short survey.