How Washington Post used Instagram to tell the stories of first-generation voters in Miami
The Washington Post is hosting a debate on Wednesday in partnership with Univision and Facebook. It’s taking place at Miami Dade College’s Kendall campus in Florida.
In planning, The Post team was looking to tell stories that took into account the sense of place and importance of the voters in Florida. There is a reason why there are two debates here in the span of two days.
Specifically on the college campus where the debate is being held, the student population is 78.8 percent Hispanic, and 46 percent are non-native English speakers. In talking to the students, we settled on telling stories of first-time voters on campus.
Instagram was a natural choice for this project, because we wanted to capture portraits of the students while also including long, blog-style captions. We decided to use Instagram’s Boomerang app to capture more dynamic portraits of students that had a bit more dimension than a static photo would.
Because many of MDC Kendall’s students are immigrants or non-native English speakers, we wanted to speak to their experiences authentically by including Spanish translations of their comments, which were included at the top of the caption, with the English versions pasted below.
Several of these interviews were also conducted in Spanish and then translated into English, thanks to the help of interns from the Medill School of Journalism, Isabella Gutierrez and Mariana Alfaro.
In addition to the portraits, we included Boomerang-style graphics created by Washington Post designer Rachel Orr that we published in between photos. Whenever we do an editorial project specific to a social platform, we also think about how it may find a home off the platform. For this project, we wrote up a blog post on Post Politics and converted the Boomerangs to GIFs to be shared on Twitter and Tumblr.
Check out the project for yourself on Instagram, and let me know what you think!
Be sure to tune in to tonight’s Democratic Debate at 9pm ET! The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty will be moderating along with Jorge Ramos and María Elena Salinas of Univision.
