Behind the scenes of two bilingual collaborative reporting projects
The impact and challenges of collaborative bilingual reporting
As a bilingual, Latinx journalist, I’ve seen the importance of publishing news in both English and Spanish, and I know that a lot of other people do too. However, Spanish-language news can be hard to come by.
The State of Latino News Media report from 2019 found “an industry made up of 624 Latino news outlets serving a potential audience of close to 59 million people” in the United States and Puerto Rico (a U.S. territory). Among the challenges mentioned in the study for these outlets are sustainability, lack of resources, and difficulty “finding experienced bilingual journalists familiar with Latino issues.”
Journalism collaborations are working to fill that void.
Enlace Latino NC and Southerly join forces for Latinx audiences
Enlace Latino NC is a non-profit organization focused on topics like immigration, health, and local politics for first- and second-generation Latinos in North Carolina that consume news in Spanish. The topics that are relevant to Latinx people in North Carolina are varied and complex and they want news in the language that they feel more comfortable in, but it can be hard to find, according to Paola Jaramillo, co-founder of Enlace Latino NC.
“In our case, we produce information in Spanish to unify our voices, so that more people know us, and know what happens to us, and to generate change,” Jaramillo said over the phone.
Lindsey Gilpin, founder of Southerly, and Jaramillo met a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, to discuss how their newsrooms might collaborate. While they didn’t finish the meeting with a deal in place, they did work on collaborating.
Then in 2021, Southerly and Enlace Latino NC carried out a six-month collaboration with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, “which supported our reporting on the intersection of economic mobility and environmental issues in rural Latinx and immigrant communities in North Carolina,” Gilpin said.
Several factors contributed to the success of the collaboration, according to Gilpin. For one, the people behind both newsrooms trusted each other and communicated openly and frequently. Also, both outlets agreed to put the audience they were working to serve together above all else. In terms of tools for collaboration, they used Zoom for weekly meetings and Facebook Live for their events.
The impact of the collaboration was visible in different ways as Gilpin mentioned: reaching more than 1,300 people via Facebook Live events, a panel about health care access with positive attendance, and positive feedback on other events as well. Plus, they won the Collaboration of the Year (small revenue tier) at the 2022 LION Local Journalism Awards.
Fellowship helps Cicero Independiente publish bilingually
In 2019, three residents of Cicero, Illinois, each with varying levels of journalism experience, met to lay the foundation for what would eventually become to Cicero Independiente — a bilingual, news outlet serving communities in Cicero and Berwyn.
They started by figuring out administrative work like payroll, grant writing, and more, said co-founder Irene Romulo. Collaboration has always been a part of their approach to news, and now in its fourth year, collaboration is part of Cicero Independiente’s sustainability as a small news organization with two staff members.
“Since the beginning, we’ve seen collaborations as essential in our growth and adding to our capacity, being able to learn from other newsrooms and other practices and also being able to share how we do the work,” said Romulo. “Since the beginning, we started off with really strong, I guess, what other people would call engagement, but to us, it’s just relationship building and really getting to know people in our community. So other newsrooms have benefited from that as well.”
Publishing news in English and Spanish has also been part of Cicero Independiente’s collaborative journalism process. It’s one of the priorities that the team focuses on with their collaborators as they work to reach diverse audiences, even if their partners don’t publish in Spanish.
One example is their bilingual collaboration with Type Investigations, which Romulo spearheaded as a 2020 Ida B. Wells Fellow. Injustice Watch, a non-profit newsroom in Chicago later joined in the reporting process. The investigation, ‘Gang Contracts’ in Cicero and Berwyn schools raise concerns about criminalization of youth, found that “more than 100 students in seven years have signed “gang contracts” for suspected gang affiliation” — sometimes for no apparent reason.
Not only was it published in print and online, but they also distributed poster with know your rights information. Community response to this work included high schools reaching out and wanting to know how the reporting was done, and some people speaking about it at board meetings.
“It’s important to remember that we shouldn’t assume to know what people who are immigrants or people who speak a language other than English need, said Romulo. Instead, newsrooms should “take the time to actually talk to people and listen, ask questions and learn what issues are important to them, what information they actually need, and the best way to deliver to them.”
“You can’t just translate stories and expect that they will have an impact or that people will even know that they exist. You need to both try to meet those needs that people have and find a way to deliver information to them, [to] share information and resources in ways that will be useful,” Romulo said.
The folks at Cicero Independiente created trusting relationships with editors at both publications, leading them to work on other projects together after the initial collaboration, according to Romulo.
Coming together to produce and disseminate news to reach audiences that media outlets wouldn’t normally reach, and often at a cheaper cost than working solo, are two major benefits of collaboration.
Bilingual collaborations in particular are important and are an option to consider for many media outlets moving forward as they try to connect with audiences; to publish content in languages other than English, including but not limited to Spanish.
Mariela Santos-Muniz is a freelance journalist and a part-time collaborative journalism newsletter and database coordinator for the Center for Cooperative Media. Follow Mariela on Twitter.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with operational and project funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, NJ Civic Information Consortium, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation and the Independence Public Media Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
