I so enjoy the way that my interview subject for this week’s episode of The Journalism Salute, José Ignacio Castañeda Perez begins the news features he writes for the non-profit newsroom Spotlight Delaware. He excels at the one sentence narrative lede that draws you into these stories.
In this case, the first one was about Latino residents struggling to get proper dental care, the second was about Delawareans left in limbo for DACA eligibility and the third shadowed a day in the life in immigration court.
Another thing that's cool about Spotlight Delaware is that almost every story features a gray box at the top with a bold header of "Why should Delaware care?"
For example, for the dental care story:
In our interview, I referred to this as "a more mature version of TLDR."
José explained its purpose:
It's such a struggle to keep people's attention these days and that's why I'm so impressed with José and Spotlight Delaware.
In the rest of the conversation we traced José’s journalism origin story, examined his serious news stories, walked through how he writes feature stories with a theatrical flare , and explored how he and the staff work to find the people who should be reading them.
Hope you'll listen to this episode of The Journalism Salute!
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