Editorial Collaborations with Ethnic Media

Ngoc Nguyen, New America MediaASNE –APME

Chicago - 2014

What is New America Media?

• National nonprofit news service for ethnic media

• Capacity building/ professional development through journalism fellowships for ethnic media

• Engagement through roundtables and media briefings

Why collaborate with ethnic media?

• Over 57 million ethnic adults connect to each other, to home countries and to America through 3000+ ethnic media outlets.

• 1 in 5 ethnic adults in California speak no English at all (Mark DiCamillo, Field Poll)

• NAM collaborations started with understanding that you had to collaborate with ethnic media to have a more inclusive journalism.

• Editorial collaborations are complementary partnerships that can bring to light coverage that neither news outlet could do very well on their own.

Breaking Silence, Breaking Taboos

• NAM partnered with the Two Rivers Tribune, a community newspaper serving Hoopa tribal members in Northern California to document the devastation of the meth epidemic within the tribal community.

• Two Rivers Tribune reporter Ali Hostler wrote a two-part series. NAM reporter Jacob Simas produced a 20-min video.

Breaking Silence, Breaking Taboos

Breaking Silence, Breaking Taboos

What each partner brought to the table?• Each outlet contributed a PT reporter• NAM brought multimedia capability• Two Rivers Tribune brought deep knowledge

and connections that were essential to reporting this story.

• USC Annenberg Health Reporting Grant

Breaking Silence, Breaking Taboos

How do we measure success?• Here the success of the story wasn’t in the

number of eyeballs reached, but the start of conversations about taboo topics within small and often isolated ethnic communities.

• These are stories that are told within the community, by the community and for the community.

Creating a Women Immigrants Newsbeat

• NAM wanted to focus coverage on a significant shift in global migration: the emergence of women as the new majority of immigrants in the hemisphere.

• We developed a reporting fellowship focused on issues affecting women immigrants for both ethnic and mainstream media.

Women Immigrants Newsbeat

• Natasha Dado, a reporter with Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan reported on the struggles of Muslim women in Detroit-Dearborn to gain religious divorces.

Women Immigrants Newsbeat

Women Immigrants Newsbeat

What was the story’s impact?• Within a week of publication, leading local

imams met to review and revise policies that unfairly discriminated against women in Islamic divorce proceedings.

• The publication of this story in a trusted news media outlet broke the taboo against Muslim women speaking out about Islamic divorce proceedings.

Womens Immigrant Newsbeat

• Thanh Tan, at the time a reporter with the Texas Tribune, produced a two-part series on immigrant women fearful of traveling outside a no-woman’s-land between the Texas-Mexico border and interior border checkpoints to seek abortions.

Women Immigrants Newsbeat

Women Immigrants Newsbeat

What was the story’s impact? • The New York Times Western Edition and The

Rachel Maddow show picked up Tan’s reports.• NAM’s support for this coverage helped to

intensify an echo chamber of concern in the border communities of Texas that coincided with a state crackdown on access to abortion that led to two lawsuits to protect women’s reproductive rights.

Sea Rise Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon?

• Editorial collaboration with six Bay Area ethnic and community media and Climate Central, a hybrid research and journalism organization.

• http://newamericamedia.org/news/environment/sea-level-rise/index.php

Sea Rise Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon?

Sea Rise Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon?

• The project brought together data analysis, sophisticated interactive mapping tools, and hyperlocal reporting by ethnic and community media.

• Our goal was to produce vital explanatory and community journalism

Sea Rise Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon?

• We found that 60 percent of the people impacted by sea rise-driven flooding in the Bay Area are from immigrant and minority communities. At the same time, our reporting showed there was a dangerous information gap among communities.

• Project reporters highlight the human dimension of sea rise’s impacts in the most vulnerable Bay Area communities. Coverage includes threats from rising seas to Oakland’s sewer system, severe flood risk for a largely minority and low-income city in Silicon Valley, and one neighborhood’s fight to save a wetland that is now protecting them from rising seas.

Sea Rise Coming to your Neighborhood Soon?

• Stories in this collaboration appeared in English, Chinese and Spanish and across multiple platforms, including print, online, radio and television.

Sea Rise Coming to Your Neighborhood Soon?

Lessons Learned• This was a data-driven project, but the data had

limitations and spurred more questions than answers in the end.

• The data told us where to focus our reporting; it showed us which places and communities would be most impacted.

• The value of the project was the combination of data, interactive mapping tools, and localized reporting that made the coverage more relevant to communities most impacted.