Q&A: Madeleine Bair on collaborating with local communities to tell impactful stories
Madeleine Bair is the founder of El Tímpano, a local participatory reporting lab built in partnership with Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.
Bair has worked across the fields of journalism, international human rights, and documentary filmmaking — learning how to collaborate in service of telling impactful stories that might not be heard otherwise.
We caught up with Bair to hear how she’s working together with local communities in Oakland to build and shape El Tímpano.
WF: How did you first get involved in journalism?
MB: I got my start in journalism when I was eight years old and joined a youth media organization in Oakland called Children’s Express. The aspect of journalism that has always resonated with me is listening and having a platform to share different perspectives. A lot of journalists are drawn to writing, but for me, it was the aspect of listening to people’s stories and asking good questions.
In youth media, you’re not only learning how to be a journalist and how to prepare for interviews, but you’re also learning to analyze the media and ask questions about who media is for and whose voices are reflected or left out. That has really stuck with me in thinking through how I can collaborate with people at the center of the story, rather than assuming that I’m the best person to tell the story. I firmly believe that no one is better equipped to tell a story than those at the center of it.
WF: In addition to journalism, you’ve also worked in fields like international human rights. How has that added to your perspective?
MB: Throughout my career, I’ve straddled the boundaries between journalism, community media, documentary film, as well as human rights documentation and advocacy. For many years, I did work in the field of international human rights, and a big part of that was working with the organization WITNESS. It’s based in Brooklyn but partners with human rights and media activists around the world, using videos to document issues going on in their own communities — like working with bystanders to document police abuse in their neighborhoods, or media activists documenting the war in Syria.
I was exposed to a lot of really creative and innovative ways of using media to document stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told, or at least wouldn’t be told in a fully truthful or holistic way. In doing so, I really learned about putting the tools of journalism in the hands of people who didn’t necessarily consider themselves journalists, but wanted to tell these stories.
WF: Has it been challenging to work across these different fields?
MB: It’s not been a challenge, it’s really been an asset. I wouldn’t have founded El Tímpano if I didn’t have experiences in the field of advocacy or documentary filmmaking. It was really interesting to see how documentaries can break a lot of rules we have in traditional journalism, around the relationship that filmmakers have with the subjects of their stories. It’s really out of necessity, because to tell a story through documentary film, you have to be a part of someone’s life to follow them around with a crew. I worked on a film about a teenager in his senior year of high school, and it also took place somewhere we were not based. We had a few reporting trips there, and we also invited him to tell his story when we weren’t there. In that way, he was a part of the filmmaking process with us. To me, that’s collaboration — it enables you to tell a story that you wouldn’t be able to tell if you didn’t have that sort of relationship with the individuals or communities that you’re covering.
In the field of international human rights, I was focused on documenting human rights abuses or war crimes, which could be used to seek justice. It was really besides the point whether the people creating the documentation were trained journalists or activists — it was just a matter of finding verifiable or compelling evidence of injustice, and thinking about how it could help create change. Those perspectives have helped me center storytelling and see these debates over whether something should be considered journalism, or whether someone is a journalist or activist, as really besides the point and a distraction from what I want to do — which is tell true and impactful stories.
WF: What moved you to start El Tímpano?
MB: From all these experiences, I really wanted El Tímpano to be a media organization that works in partnership with the communities that we serve to produce our journalism. The seed for the idea was born many years before I started working on it. A lot of the motivation for El Tímpano was born out of the frustration of what journalism was not doing. I saw a lot of innovation in how you could tell stories, how you could report and cover issues from unique and important perspectives that otherwise wouldn’t be told. Yet here in the US, I was seeing a lot of investments in innovating journalism, but they were really about telling the same stories to the same people in different ways. I could see from the work I was doing internationally there were so many possibilities to use these new strategies to tell stories that weren’t being told, or to serve communities who weren’t being served.
I wound up moving back to Oakland at the start of 2017 and had already been marinating on this idea, gathering a lot of references and inspiration, particularly from the work I had been doing internationally. I had a hunch that there would be a need for this, just based on changing demographics in Oakland and the Bay Area. When I moved back, Latino immigrants were the fastest growing population in my hometown, but you wouldn’t know that by consuming local media. At the same time, the existing Spanish language news outlets that served Latino immigrants in the Bay Area had for the most part been decreasing for several decades.
I didn’t want to make assumptions, especially because I wasn’t from Oakland’s Latino immigrant community, so I started by sitting down with community leaders and asking them what they thought. I was very open to the possibility that I would learn there was great existing local media serving Latino immigrants, and I would have gone home and found something else to do. But every single person I sat down with said there was a huge need and gap in local news and information that both serves and reflects Oakland’s Latino immigrant communities. In the process, I found a lot of willing and eager collaborators to help continue to pursue those questions and design a way to address those gaps.
WF: Who were some of those early collaborators and how did they help shape El Tímpano?
MB: One person I met early on was a young leader from Oakland’s indigenous Mayan Mam community named Henry Sales. A librarian had connected me to him, as he had been working with the library, trying to develop and design better ways to inform the indigenous Mayan community that he was a part of. He became an early partner and worked with me, so that in our participatory design process, we weren’t hearing only from Latino immigrants, but also from indigenous Mayan immigrants.
That was the first wave of development from the idea that I had in my mind for El Tímpano, it really expanded thanks to collaborating with community leaders like Henry. Thanks to him, I learned much more about Oakland’s indigenous Mayan community and the specific needs and barriers for information and being reflected in local journalism. Years later, we just officially launched a new initiative called Tumil El Tímpano that is the result of years-long relationships we’ve built with leaders from the Mayan community.
WF: What are some other examples of collaborative projects you’ve worked on at El Tímpano?
MB: While we’ve partnered with a number of local and national media outlets — including Latino USA, KQED, El Tecolote, The Oaklandside, Univision, and Kaiser Health News — our more frequent collaborators are community-based organizations and government agencies, and there are several ways we partner with them. For instance, El Tímpano is a member of Resilient Fruitvale — a coalition of CBOs serving East Oakland communities that came together to strengthen relationships, support one another, and coordinate efforts during the pandemic. As one example, when COVID-19 vaccines were just starting to be distributed, El Tímpano worked with partners at local community clinics to make sure Spanish-speaking East Oakland residents had the information they needed to register for vaccines.
As a civic media outlet, we see our role as not only informing community members, but also connecting them to other local resources, experts, and to one another. During wildfire season in California, air quality is a serious health issue and one that disproportionately affects communities of color due to higher rates of underlying respiratory illnesses. Through our Spanish- and Mam-language reporting, we’ve informed our audience about the risks of breathing polluted air, ways to protect their health, and how to learn the quality of the air they breathe. But our reporting also uncovered the fact that a lot of emergency preparedness resources such as trainings and notifications simply aren’t available in Spanish.
And so wildfire preparedness was the perfect issue to plan an event around — a DIY air filter workshop — that would literally put our audience in the same room as other local resources and bridge linguistic barriers that all too often result in gaps in life-saving information. For this workshop, we partnered with a local mutual aid organization, Common Humanity Collective, which conducts DIY air filter trainings, as well as with the City of Oakland’s Emergency Services Division, which provided a presentation on basic steps to take to plan for an emergency. Our role was that of convener, while our partners provided their unique expertise, and our audience walked away more informed, connected, and with an air filter they built to take home.
WF: When looking towards the future of healthy and sustainable journalism, what do you think more people need to do in their work? What is missing from common approaches?
MB: Many news outlets bristle at the idea of collaborating with those that may be the subject of accountability reporting, such as a nonprofit or government agency. But from our point of view, our relationship with local agencies doesn’t have to be adversarial. Yes, there may be times when our reporting leads to us investigating them — and we absolutely do and will with independence and rigor — but there may be other times when we have a shared goal, such as informing community members about how to prepare for an emergency.
I encourage those working in local news to think about when and how their goals align with those of others in their community, and how they can work together to strengthen one another’s efforts. That question is a great starting point for collaborations.
Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email 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 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.
