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I don’t like following national news through social media video. With very few exceptions, I prefer reading in detail rather than watching something distilled.
But for local news, I feel differently. I want to be able to visualize what’s going on in my community And that’s partly because of my experience with a relatively new news source here, Lehigh Daily.
Lehigh Daily is a combination website and social media presence (Instagram and TikTok) founded by Lehigh Valley (PA) resident, Jai Smith, a journalism outsider whose work is as a gaming platform developer. Jai’s never so much as taken a journalism class. But with the help of resources like Tiny News Collective and his small staff of freelancers and recent college grads & students, he’s created something with the potential to be valuable to the community of eastern Pennsylvanians.
Jai was my interview subject on this week’s episode of The Journalism Salute.
“I’m getting a little older now. I just turned 30 a month ago. I have a 2-year old and I’m paying more attention to what’s going on around me. A year ago when I founded the site, it was a moment where I was consuming local news and I wasn’t unhappy with the reporting, but with the product itself and I felt that it could be modernized…
I've kind of had an entrepreneurial itch since I was 16 and starting to get off on my own. And so I've been building things and, and products and websites for a while. So it's definitely more of an entrepreneurial venture, but it’s equally paired with, if not more, to help and benefit the community because I think that it can be done better or differently in the area. So it's kind of that intermixing of the two for benefit of everyone, but also to run it as a business and show that local news can be sustainable.”
Jai and his scrappy crew cover local stories. They’re at city council meetings and local protests and shooting video when there’s a flash flood (one reporter, Isabel Hope, covers a lot of the hard news stories). But they also do shortform video of things like local business openings and closings, and fun features, like riding the rides at the local amusement park with Brandon Graham of the Philadelphia Eagles. It reminds me a little bit of a modern version of the New York City weekly, Our Town that used to be in our building as a kid.
“If there's a new popular business opening, it makes sense to cover it. If there's a large fire, it makes sense to cover it. So right now we're not too super diverse in what we're covering compared to other people or other outlets in our written content.
But in our social video, I think, is really where we shine.”
It’s a mix that seems to provide something for everyone, which quite frankly, the legacy paper here, the Allentown Morning Call (owned by newswrecker Alden Global Capital) isn’t doing. Our community also has Lehigh Valley Public Media, an NPR station and their website companion, Lehigh Valley News, as well as a few other community media offerings, and the cable TV channel WFMZ. They do a very good job, but there’s definitely room for something like what Jai is doing that probably makes more sense to a younger demographic.
Right now Jai is both editor-in-chief and publisher and he acknowledges that long term he’d like to be more of the latter, letting the journalism people fully do the journalism while he formulates the overall direction of the product. But right now, this is in such an early stage, that’s not viable yet.
And I actually like that this episode captures what it’s like a year in, with the enthusiasm still very much there, but the financial backing not quite there yet. If you’re a professor, this is a good one for aspiring journalism entrepreneurs. If you’re just a local news nerd, it’s a good one to learn about 2025 coverage techniques. And if you’re neither, please listen anyway … and share with someone else who might be interested.