Authenticity performs.
Performers participate in cultural celebrations at Cultures in the Creek 2025 in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Photographed by Aeon Bailey for The Berkeley Independent.
Whether you’re seeking to make your local newspaper more ubiquitous and accessible or looking to expand your nonprofit’s community impact, remember that realness has reach.
Branding: Summerville Journal Scene
-
![]()
Championed good journalism as a core value by delivering carefully researched stories, citing credible resources and making public corrections as needed, as well as maintaining honest conversations with community members who interacted with staff.
-
![]()
Centered community in efforts to provide a public service. Cited the importance of community in columns and affirmed to readers their town is special and unique.
-
![]()
Rallied community support for a bigger, bolder local newspaper by openly believing in the future success of the small publication. Penned a column generating enthusiasm about the paper's potential. Advocated that a growing municipality needs and deserves journalism that grows alongside it.
-
![]()
Increased accessibility by introducing new mediums for content delivery to the publication's toolkit, including a podcast. Championed a multimedia initiative to make the newspaper an inviting resource for everyone, as well as make staff approachable to readers.
-
![]()
Demonstrated relevance by keeping the paper adaptable; created memes, TikToks and eye-catching graphics to promote stories on social media. Spearheaded an initiative to regularly deliver quality video content, which partially helped inform sister paper The Post And Courier's content strategy.
A young tree is planted at Wassamassaw Community Park as part of Summerville Parks and Recreation’s 2025 food forest project. Photographed by Aeon Bailey for the Summerville Journal Scene.
“National news is important, but change is affected at the local level, and that’s why we need strong local reporting,” [Bailey] said. “That’s why I’m happy and grateful to be here.”
Click to read the full article.
Branding: Summerville Orchestra
Works under the leadership of Executive Director Nina Kahn to develop fresh materials for the orchestra in support of a more accessible, wider-reaching brand voice. Such materials include (but are not limited to) the video shown, as well as programs, brochures, signage, social media content and email newsletters. Strategies include community collaboration, analytics analysis that informs planning and a fresh approach to visuals with more opportunities to incorporate unique and appealing fonts and colors.
Branding: @AEONAGO
Grows an audience by crafting unique content that is propelled (but not constrained) by the momentum of internet trends. Successful @AEONAGO content is quirky, nostalgic and sharply edited. The @AEONAGO brand has garnered approximately 5,300 followers and 2.3 million likes on TikTok, as well as approximately 800 followers on Instagram. TikTok content for @AEONAGO is exclusively faceless, whereas the Instagram provides a glimpse into the artist’s life. These accounts allow for experimentation and an understanding of the online media ecosystem, which help inform more professional branding endeavors for partners with bigger audiences.