Q&A: Kevin Martinez on how the Los Angeles Local News Initiative centers expertise already within communities
Kevin Martinez is the community engagement director for Boyle Heights Beat and the Los Angeles Local News Initiative. Martinez first joined Boyle Heights Beat in high school to participate in its student journalism program. Now, he’s helping to lead the creation of local news organizations just like Boyle Heights Beat across Los Angeles.
We caught up with Martinez to hear about how collaboration and community engagement are vital to the mission of Boyle Heights Beat and the LA Local News Initiative, as well as the new LA Documenters site, which he is also helping to grow across LA.
WF: How did you get involved in journalism?
KM: I got involved with Boyle Heights Beat back in 2011 as a junior at Roosevelt High School. I didn’t necessarily see myself pursuing journalism and didn’t even really consider myself a strong writer, but I joined because there were a lot of skills I wanted to learn. Ultimately, I was able to improve my writing and confidence.
I published a few articles about local businesses, and I even had a piece about Hollywood’s stereotypical depiction of Latinos make it into the Huffington Post. I went to college in Utah and majored in sociology, and then got a graduate degree in education. One consistent thread was researching, and that interest was sparked through Boyle Heights Beat — a lot of journalism requires extensive research, picking out quotes, finding themes, and transcribing. All of the things I learned at Boyle Heights Beat, I expanded on in college.
I was in Utah for six years, and then I came back to LA in 2018 to work in the nonprofit sector, mainly in educational settings. I always stayed connected to Kris Kelley, who was the executive director of Boyle Heights Beat and is also now the managing director of student journalism and community engagement for the LA Local News Initiative.
As the newsroom evolved throughout the pandemic, she asked if I was interested in training our high school youth. I joined as a part-time employee and fell in love again with the work of Boyle Heights Beat. I really see a lot of power in this work, specifically the high school journalism program. I loved working with students and getting their stories published. I transitioned into a full-time role doing community engagement, and when we joined the LA Local News Initiative, my role became more expansive, and now I do engagement and partnerships for the initiative, as well as leading LA Documenters.
WF: How has Boyle Heights Beat evolved to become a major part of the LA Local News Initiative?
KM: Boyle Heights Beat is a hyperlocal newsroom that’s been around for almost 15 years. We’re celebrating our 15th anniversary in October. We started as a high school journalism program, and the goal originally was to provide an opportunity for high school youth to write about their community — issues they’re passionate about — and present their community in a different lens.
Traditionally, the media has presented Boyle Heights and communities like Boyle Heights in a very negative, stereotypical way. Boyle Heights Beat started challenging that dominant narrative of the community. During the pandemic, we evolved into a more professional newsroom, posting more on a daily basis. A lot of the content was what you would consider service journalism — we realized a lot of folks weren’t receiving timely, accurate news about where to find the nearest vaccination site, or where to find free COVID testing, so we filled in that gap in our local community by connecting folks to those resources and information. We adapted to that changing need and hired our first full-time staff reporter as a result. We suddenly went from just being a high school program for students to a professional newsroom.
Most recently, we joined the LA Local News Initiative as the first newsroom. We’re gonna be launching other newsrooms across LA County using our Boyle Heights Beat model of providing student journalism opportunities, but also covering local communities with local reporters.
We know that it’s not going to look exactly the same in every community, since every community looks different and has unique needs, skill sets, and lived experiences — but we want to leverage that and offer what we do best to adapt to the communities’ needs. It’s all about keeping the community at the forefront of our work. One prime example is when we hosted our candidate forum for the local council district 14 election last October. Prior to the event, we surveyed 500 residents throughout the district on what issues they would like their elected official to address. They also had the space to ask questions that we could present to the candidates during the form.
We had two moderators: David Garcia, one of the youth reporters at Boyle Heights Beat, and Lilia Acosta, a prominent community leader and board member at Proyecto Pastoral, a local nonprofit we’ve collaborated with. That’s the epitome of the community engagement we strive to do. Not just asking folks their thoughts, but engaging them actively and keeping them at the forefront of our work. A core pillar of our work at Boyle Heights Beat is our rapport with the community, and building that trust through our community engagement.
WF: How does Documenters fit into the LA Local News Initiative, and how have you collaborated with other Documenters’ sites?
KM: With LA Documenters, we are training and paying local residents to document public meetings. We give an opportunity for historically marginalized people to engage in this work and keep their local government accountable. These communities are impacted directly by policy decision-makers, and community members can observe what happens and public meetings and document them while leaving their biases at the door. There’s a lot of power in that.
The way we’ve approached Documenters here is by using the trust we have in Boyle Heights and leveraging the local organizations in the respective communities where we expand to. What’s great about Documenters is that the journalism aspect is almost secondary. The main thing is simple — what would you like to tell your neighbor about this local government meeting that’s happening? How would you present that information in a digestible, conversational way?
It’s very accessible, and we’ve tried to be mindful of the different access needs folks have. We haven’t had any issues with getting buy-in from folks. We actually have had to cap our orientations because we do get a lot of interest. We want to build it with intention and make sure we have that real engagement. We’ve covered about 15 public meetings since we launched LA Documenters a few months ago. The San Diego Documenters site was pretty instrumental in our launch. We visited their site in November of last year to get an idea of how they’re doing things.
I was particularly interested in their partnership with San Diego City College, as they pay college students to do this work, and also in the Spanish language public meeting coverage. We still keep in touch with the San Diego folks, and we had a check-in over Zoom about a month ago. In the future, there will be opportunities where we’ll be facilitating workshops together and covering meetings that impact Southern California together. That’s the great thing about this Documenters network: you can collaborate so much.
WF: What are you most excited about as the LA Local News Initiative continues to develop?
KM: We’re expanding our Documenters meeting coverage. Our goal for the first few months was to cover the meetings that are impacting the eastside of LA, including Boyle Heights. We just started expanding our coverage of meetings into Koreatown, South LA, and Altadena, which was an area heavily impacted by the LA fires. We’re slowly but surely expanding our efforts. That’s the ultimate goal: to have Documenters across LA County. We want it to be sustainable and with intention, so we’re dipping our toes in different areas and trying to scale. Those efforts will also go hand-in-hand with the launch of our newsrooms.
We’ll be launching two newsrooms within the next six months or so, and finding those partners and key stakeholders is a huge part of my role. Meeting with local groups, like residents associations, and planning community listening sessions with them so we can better understand what these communities would want our coverage to look like, and what issues they care about, and what they want to know more about. Meeting with local high schools, keeping them in the loop, so that when we do launch, we also have students being represented in the newsroom. We also have a list of media partners on our website.
The idea is that we have an agreement that we can all share and republish content and give each other credit. We’re doing this in collaboration and partnership with other outlets in LA doing incredible work. Everyone has their expertise and coverage areas, and we just want to collaborate and complement each other’s work, never compete with anyone.
WF: What are some lessons or insights that you’ve learned in your work?
KM: I always get reminded that there’s a wealth of knowledge and experience living within our communities already. Oftentimes, we paint experts as researchers with PhDs or people with fancy titles — they are experts in their respective fields, but I think there’s a lot of expertise within the local business owner, or the street vendor that’s been selling at the corner of Soto Avenue and 4th Street for 20 years. This needs to be recognized and elevated as expertise. As we approach this work and launch newsrooms, that’s what I mean by keeping the community at the forefront. Not just asking them to complete a survey, but actually involving them in work like Documenters. Giving them the opportunity to enhance skill sets that they can use in other areas of their life. It’s been a reminder to me that it’s not a matter of what we can bring to them, but how we can leverage what they already have and are already doing to co-create this together.
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Will Fischer is a journalist covering local and collaborative media ecosystems. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. You can reach him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
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 support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
