Why a reporting project to serve immigrant communities in Sonoma County needs to keep going

A hunger for information is there, but more resources needed to nourish it

Immediately after COVID-19 began to take hold across the Bay Area, there were concerns about how vital information would be distributed to some of the region’s most vulnerable residents. Sonoma County holds many of those; not only is a large part of the population considered to be essential workers, but much of the information distributed from public health departments has been in English during past disasters, and many residents’ only language is Spanish. Also several thousand residents speak one of a few indigenous languages for which information isn’t translated at all.

KBBF services this population, as well as eight other Bay Area counties, by offering bilingual news and programming, but in recent disasters has had trouble getting translated reports, or any reports, from Sonoma County officials. The objective became clear: Assist KBBF with the resources to better persuade the county for timely information, provide it to listeners in a way they can understand, be a source of information about the spread of the virus, and create a community where questions can be addressed quickly by the station.

What was done

The Community Reporting Immigrant Service Project’s (CRISP) first task was to begin reporting on the more critical issues facing vulnerable residents, through reporting, question-and-answer sessions with leaders, and first-person accounts. Some of the reporting was done in English, then translated into Spanish; other interviews were conducted in Spanish.. The reporting was hosted in a weekly public-affairs show on KBBF, Informe.

A list of stories includes:

• Adan Lopez, a profile of an undocumented worker’s experience of the pandemic.
• Rising Covid-19 infections, what has happened after reopening.
• Language justice: how are indigenous peoples are taken into account — or not taken into account — during the pandemic.
• Tracking the Sonoma County Sheriff’s shifting positions on enforcing public health orders
• An interview with Sonoma County Public Health Officer Sundari Mase
• An interview with two doctors about coronavirus, Covid-19 and the Latino community.
• Reopening: the importance of including the immigrant community in the conversation about when and how to reopen the Sonoma County economy.
• At home: What renters face as the eviction moratoriums come to an end.
• Paid sick leave: what it is and how it works
• Voices of the pandemic
• Daysi Lopez, a profile of an undocumented worker’s experience of the pandemic.

What we learned

Initially we thought that getting Sonoma County to respond with necessary information would be the toughest task, but it turns out that in response to growing concern about the pandemic — and pressure from KBBF and other Latino community leaders — the county actually stepped up its communication. That left us to focus more on reporting and content delivery, which included regular news bulletins about COVID-19 developments.

With the reporting came increased response from listeners who were grateful for our content. Previously, listeners called the station with questions on things they’d like to know more about. While that continued, after Informe’s switch to COVID-19 coverage, it also seemed like the station was answering questions ahead of time, getting ahead of the news in a way the audience valued.

Interest in Informe prompted rebroadcasts of episodes across the week. In the beginning, episodes aired four times per week. That increased to 12 and 13 times, and an interview with the two doctors about the virus aired 20 times across two weeks. Listeners also shared audio versions of the story posted to social media, and anecdotally, KBBF staff out and about would hear positive feedback in real time from the community.

Where we found challenges was building a WhatsApp community. Originally, the goal was to build a channel operated by the station, and invite users across KBBF’s audience to join the group. Listeners could ask questions there, and KBBF would curate those questions and answer them through reporting. What we quickly realized was just how much of an undertaking it would be to build a channel from zero and integrate WhatsApp into the community, and how much it would add to the plate of KBBF’s staff. For one, it would have taken some time to understand how KBBF’s listeners use WhatsApp — something that would have taken a significant amount of research before execution, which would have surpassed the time of the grant. And because there are multiple indigenous languages spoken in the region, it still would have been extra effort to translate anything in those.

What we learned from this, however — and from studying the experiences of others in the industry, including Documented NY and Conecta Arizona — is that when the time is taken to match its function to a community’s needs, WhatsApp can be a valuable resource. Right now, no one at KBBF is in a position to take this on. This probably posits a question to the industry at large:, how can more immigrant serving outlets, many of which are already strapped for resources, find the capability to add WhatsApp to their day-to-day engagement?

Where to go next

It’s clear to us that when given the resources, Informe can be the type of public-affairs show that KBBF’s audience deserves.

What was missing from KBBF was the added manpower able to gather interviews with key Sonoma County figures and others in the public and the ability to translate them so that KBBF’s staff can present them on air and share them more widely. Right now, the question of how to keep this level of reporting going for Informe is what needs to be answered.

A short-term goal is to take the batch of stories that have been done so far and package them in grant applications as proof that there is an appetite for this kind of journalism. We have also talked to another group about sharing what has been done so far in a content-sharing exchange.

But we know that not just KBBF, but other outlets in the same position that serve audiences primarily made of immigrant readers and listeners, listeners whose first language isn’t English, or both, do not always have the funding to pursue such large-scale projects unless they have an infusion of cash similar to the JSK COVID grant — which brings the question of how to make such journalism sustainable, when it’s clearly necessary? We’re hoping that our industry recognizes this, based on the relatively quick results we’ve seen with Informe, and takes appropriate action.