This small New Jersey newsroom treated its voter guide like a service product

The voter guide is a classic local news product — and one of the hardest to get people to use.

The Jersey Bee, a nonprofit newsroom covering Essex County, New Jersey, found a way around that problem during the recent NJ-11 special election. Their approach shows what happens when a small newsroom treats civic journalism as a product.

The challenge: voter guides nobody reads

When the NJ-11 special election primary was announced to fill the seat vacated by now-governor Mikie Sherrill, The Jersey Bee’s team set out to rethink the voter guide format. They originally planned an in-person candidate forum but moved to video interviews instead.

Executive editor Simon Galperin wrote on LinkedIn: “Voter guide engagement is a particular sore spot for local news organizations. They’re easy to produce but hard to get people to see.”

The Jersey Bee team started from a different question: how do people already consume information, and how can we build something that fits?

“Our first few voter guides centered on the candidates and not the community. The headings were candidate names, followed by long Q&As. Then we organized our 2024 gubernatorial primary guide around the issues people cared about and got good feedback. So listening and centering community needs helped set the stage for the editorial structure, and an audience-first approach determined the production strategy.”

Web traffic and social media analytics provided by The Jersey Bee.

The Jersey Bee reported that the video voter guide content, month-over-month, accounted for 8% of site traffic, an increase of 121% in Instagram traffic, a 289% increase in Instagram reach, an 186% increase in Instagram content interactions, a 95% increase in profile visits, and a 49% increase in Instagram follows.

Community-first, then product

The Jersey Bee sat down with 10 of the 11 candidates running in the Democratic primary and filmed interviews at Rec Room, a community coworking space inside the Lackawanna Station in Montclair. The interviews and editorial content were produced by a three-person team: Galperin, engagement producer Nikki Villafane, and civic info producer Natalie Tsur.

From Galperin’s LinkedIn post: “We started with a social-first content strategy to reach people and built a website experience that mirrors social media to drive engagement.”

The result, at NJ11.jerseybee.org, features a grid layout of candidate responses and a swipeable feed — familiar patterns for anyone who uses Instagram or TikTok. Voters get bite-sized video answers they can flip through on their phones, designed around the way people already browse.

The Jersey Bee’s voter guide features a grid layout of candidate responses, designed around the way people already browse on mobile. (Screenshot: jerseybee.org)

The Jersey Bee already uses technology to stretch a small team.

The newsroom runs an AI-powered system called Harvest that maps, curates, and distributes local information at scale — pulling updates from school websites, Facebook pages, and local outlets into a shared Airtable hub where human editors review and refine them. That system powers a network of 13 daily local newsletters, a website, an events calendar, and social media with just 1.5 editorial staff.

For the voter guide, they applied that same approach. The interface feels native to mobile — it loads fast, the video plays inline, and the whole thing embeds cleanly on their WordPress site.

The team used AI prototyping tools and iterative development to build the interface as a standalone digital product.

The NJ-11 primary, held February 5 with 11 Democratic candidates and significant outside spending, was a crowded race where accessible voter information mattered. Analilia Mejia won with 29.1 percent of the vote — 889 votes ahead of former congressman Tom Malinowski. The general election is on April 16.

Why this matters for local publishers

What caught my attention was the product thinking. A lot of newsrooms create voter guides as static pages and figure out promotion later. The Jersey Bee started with how people would use the thing and designed the experience around that.

The swipeable format reflects how people consume information now. By building a dedicated experience on their own site, the Jersey Bee keeps the audience relationship.

Then there’s the community-first piece: filming at a local coworking space, staffing with producers focused on engagement and civic info, designing for voters in a specific district. Every decision pointed toward the audience.

The Jersey Bee built this with three people. I’m interested in how other outlets might adapt this model for their own elections, especially if they’re already experimenting with video or social distribution.

As one commenter on Galperin’s LinkedIn post put it: “Send this to everyone who says service journalism is dying.”

Disclosures: The Jersey Bee is a partner of the Center for Cooperative Media and a member of the NJ News Commons. Simon Galperin and Joe Amditis both attended Rutgers University and the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

***Joe Amditis is the associate director of operations at the [Center for Cooperative Media](http://centerforcooperativemedia.org/) at Montclair State University. Contact him at [amditisj@montclair.edu](mailto:amditisj@montclair.edu) or on Twitter at [@jsamditis](http://twitter.com/jsamditis)*.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the College of Communication and Media at *Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, Rita Allen Foundation, [Inasmuch Foundation](https://inasmuchfoundation.org/), Google News Initiative, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.*