Green-card marriages: what does the audience want to know?
When a topic is hot and the reporting possibilities too many, finding THE story adds a layer of challenge. But I had a trump card called Hearken.
This is a public-powered journalism experiment using an engagement tool called Hearken. To understand how I got here, read this.
I decided very early in my journalism graduate student journey that I wanted to serve the community of Latinas in green-card marriages.
If you are not familiar with the topic, I will quickly break it down for you: green-card marriages are sham marriages that involve a foreign-born seeking permanent residency and a U.S. citizen. It is also immigration fraud. The arrangement usually involves paying the U.S. citizen as little as $12,000 and as much as… well, I have heard of people paying $ 50,000 for a sham spouse. But I am pretty sure that was an isolated case. Rumour has it you can get one for $ 15,000 in New York.
However, it is a risky business. If caught, the foreign-born is deported and permanently barred from entering the country. The U.S. national can face up to five years in a federal prison, pay a $ 250,000 fine or both. The person can even lose their citizenship if they didn’t acquired it through birth. People still do it — and I have found data showing it could even be a trend on the rise, with more Latino immigrants overstaying their tourist visas than ever.
I had one job: to write a 700-hundred words story about the topic. But what should I focus on? There are so many possible angles and approaches. The reasons people “buy” and “sell” marriages, the demographics, the legal aspects, the emotional toll it takes on both parts… As a reader, I knew what I, Isadora, would like to learn about this universe. But that doesn’t matter, though. It is all about what the audience is interested in.
As a Social Journalism student at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in New York, I had access to Hearken, a custom platform developed for newsrooms that “enables the public to submit questions or vote on questions they would like journalists to investigate and report.” What Hearken does is help harness the audience’s curiosity and identify information gaps so they can develop more relevant content.
This is how I used Hearken to learn what people wanted to read about green-card marriages.
STEP 1: Coming up with a good prompt
In order to find out what questions your audience would like to see answered in your piece, you need to, well, ask them what those are. But what question do you ask to get a question in response? (wow, that’s confusing.)
You create a good prompt.
I have come to find that the art of coming up with the right prompt follows the rule of thumb “less is more.” I know that for a fact because I started by going on the opposite direction and it didn’t work.
You don’t want to get too specific or wordy. Like Hearken’s Bridget Thoreson said, prompts should be “as simple as a question you would
ask someone at a grocery store.”
I started by posting all seven prompts I had created in my Instagram stories. To enhance engagement, I alternated information on green-card marriage (such as its Google definition, what the penalties are for the involved, screenshots of my Medium post about the topic) with the prompts in English. I used Instagram’s feature “Ask me a question” in every story that had a prompt to encourage submission. I also used a lot of visual elements to keep people interested, such as GIFs and photo illustrations. The stories had over 140 views, but I hardly got any response.
Two friends gave me some valuable feedback: the prompts were too many, which made the stories a little overwhelming, plus, they were often too specific i.e. “What do you want to know about the childhood of a Latina woman who decided to marry for a green card?” It was then that I learned I had to pick one prompt and stick to it. I went with a hypothetical and provocative one:
“What would you ask a woman who just bought a husband in order to be able to apply for a green card?”
I used the Ask a Question feature on Facebook this time, and although I got some solid questions, it was still too little engagement. Since I didn’t know how the algorithm for this feature worked, I decided to post the prompt on my Facebook wall, as in a regular post as well, but changed the wording. I put myself in the center of the question: “If I told you I just paid for someone to marry me so I can get a green card, what would you ask me?” That was when the questions really started to pop up.
To help build momentum and boost the post, I answered people’s question whenever I had the information at hand (about the penalties, how long one must be married in order to receive a green card and etc.) I soon learned that hypothetical questions create more reaction; a lot of people actually thought I had gotten married and were not shy in expressing their biases. The comments created relevance to my post, and I believe more people were seeing it on their wall, which lead to even more comments and questions.
I then replicated the prompt on new Instagram stories, using the “Ask me a Question” feature, both in Portuguese and English. I received a lot of questions there as well — 90% from Brazilians, almost all of them, women.
My first hint: It was the Latina community, the one in the center of my investigation, who took more interest in it.
STEP 2: Releasing the prompt into the wild
Now that I knew I had a solid prompt, it was time to test it in an online community.
I posted the original prompt in a closed Facebook group called Brazilian women of NY (5,978 members,) “What would you ask a Brazilian woman who is in a green card marriage?” There was good engagement there and the questions were different than the ones I was receiving from my social media network.
While my Facebook and Instagram friends connections would ask things like “How much was it? How long do you have to be married?” Or “Do people have to have sex?,” in the closed Facebook group, where women are at least familiar with the drill from just living in the U.S., the questions were more centered on the woman’s mental health and the impact on her relationships.
My second hint: Within a demographic community, groups will have different understanding and different questions about the topic.
I was also contacted in private by two women saying they were in a green-card marriage situation, and that would gladly help me figure out the issues of the community. Yay!
In five hours I was able to collect 66 questions from 26 people, being 22 women and 4 men.
STEP 3: Collect questions and create a voting round using Hearken’s interface
I consolidated the 66 questions by theme and created eight two-part questions in Portuguese. I input them in the Hearken system and generated my Hearken Voting Round. I went back to the platforms with the link to invite people to vote for their favorite question. I created new stories on Instagram with the link to the voting round, too. I also took it to WhatsApp for the first time. Which leads me to…
[Houston, we have a problem]
In one of the WhatsApp groups I posted the Voting Round link, called “New Jersey / New York BR” (207 members,) I mostly observe and never participate. After I posted the message, I noticed new 30 votes on Hearken. However, there was a backlash: three women members called my Master’s project “horrible”, said they were not my target audience and that it was not appropriate for me to engage people in the group in a discussion about immigration fraud. Before I could explain myself, I was removed from the group.
I then confirmed what we had been discussing in Community Engagement class:
Third hint: When you parachute in a community, odds are people won’t trust you and will see you as someone trying to take advantage of them.
Later on, someone added me back to the group (without me asking for it or consenting to it) just in time for me to see a debate about whether people or being paranoid or legitimately careful. I apologized for my approach not being clear or sensitive enough. As I later learned from Sydette Harry, from The Coral Project, “Always be clear on what you are asking for and what you are going to do with it.”
As of October 22, the “Green Card Marriage Voting Round” had 137 votes, and the top three most voted questions were:
How do Latinas in green card marriages feel about the risks they are taking, such as being conned or abused by their sham partners? What guarantees do they have that they will be safe throughout the process and that the partners will comply? (31 votes)
What are the overall feelings about being in this situation? Are they happy? Are they afraid? The decision has influenced in their real romantic lives? If so, how? (20 votes)
What happens if the people involved get caught? (19 votes)
The more the question touches on how the women in this situation feel about it or is affected by it, the more the question seems to be relevant for the community. Questions regarding bureaucracy, such as the government’s in preventing these crimes, and how family and friends react when they find out about the secret had the worst performance, with an average of 10 votes. Which proves the topic has potential for a human interest story.
STEP 4: Write the story people will want to read
I wrote a 700-words profile of a Brazilian woman who is in a green-card marriage for almost a year. In there she talked about her fears, the risks and how unsure she is about her sham husband, whom she found out is an alcoholic.
I also spoke to an immigration attorney and used data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Pew Research Center, Seguridad, Justicia y Paz, and Migration Policy Initiative. I had great feedback from the profesor and teacher assistant, and we might see it published sometime soon! I will keep you all posted!
