Mosaic: Lincoln’s New Voices
• Lincoln, NE
CONTACT INFO
Tim Anderson
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Lincoln, NE
(402) 472-8241
E-mail
Website
Lincoln, Neb., has witnessed 24 percent growth in ethnic minorities and immigrants in recent years. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Journalism College will explore the information needs of these new ethnic communities and work with mobile technology and web design teams to develop a news initiative to reach them. Content will come from students, community members and high school students from immigrant families. Future support is expected from the university and foundation grants.
Check back for future news and updates.
• June 2011
• December 2010
• September 2010
New Grants Take Mosaic in New Directions
June 2011
By the end of its first year, The Mosaic project had brought in an additional $50,000 in grants to train Lincoln’s immigrant community to produce content for the website and to increase the flow of information to and from the city’s large refugee community.
Despite a heart attack that waylaid project leader Tim Anderson mid-way through the year, the project, based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications, scored “substantial progress” in designing the website and making connections in the community, Anderson said.
“Though we were thrown off-track this spring by my health problems, we have not stood still. We have worked hard to expand our infrastructure and our reach into the community,” he said.
Funding
Dean Gary Kebbel successfully applied for a $24,000 grant from the Lincoln Community Foundation. The funding will allow the project to teach its New Voices class in one of Lincoln’s 25 Community Learning Centers, as well as fund extra graduate student assistance, video cameras, and editing equipment. That grant helped to leverage a $26,000 grant from the Knight Community Information Challenge.
The city’s Community Learning Centers serve the immigrant communities by “providing support to immigrants, refugees and in-need people.” They also contain multimedia rooms that will be used to teach the public, Anderson said.
Anderson is now working to determine which center has the highest concentration of one of Mosaic’s targeted immigrant groups: Iraqi, Sudanese or Karen refugees from Burma.
“Our goal is to teach [the refugees] to participate in our New Voices project…to increase the information flow to and from the refugees as a means of aiding their assimilation into Lincoln,” he said.
Community Connection
Following Anderson’s heart attack, the spring semester class created to further the project was cancelled, and an agreement with a local newspaper, the Lincoln Journal Star, to publish newspaper reports on New Voices’ website was postponed.
However, graduate student Charlie Litton and Anderson joined the health and housekeeping committee of the local New Americans Task Force. As a result, Litton is currently working on two videos for the prevention and eradication of bed bug infestation, which will be released both on the Mosaic website and distributed via DVD to the refugee communities.
That project grew out of Mosaic’s close working relationship, begun last fall, with Lincoln’s Center for People in Need.
Anderson said cooperation throughout the community and among resettlement agencies has been enthusiastic.
Design
Additionally, the functionality and looks of the website are being improved. The new design will better display news and information, as well as “a running calendar of events and links to our growing list of partners,” Anderson said.
Mosaic Launches in Just One Semester
December 2010
In just one semester, students and faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications have researched, built, populated and marketed a website designed for the Midwest city’s booming refugee populations.
Advertising students took the lead in researching the three target communities: Karen refugees from Burma and refugees from Iraq and Sudan.
“Through surveys, focus group interviews and one-on-one interviews, the students determined that each group had slightly different news and information needs and more substantially different media habits,” said Tim Anderson, the project’s coordinator.
All three groups listed their difficulties with English as their most difficult challenge. Karen refugees also identified transportation and cultural differences as problems, while both the Iraqi and Sudanese listed employment as a difficulty. The Sudanese also added the rather specific difficulty of obtaining a Nebraska driver’s license.
“We were confident we could supply useful information no matter what the problems were, but we were very interested in learning which medium would be best to reach these three rather different communities,” he said.
To that end, their research uncovered the fact that the best way to reach the Karen, many who can not read or write their own language, may be through a regularly distributed series of DVDs. Few households have computers.
“We had hoped that mobile phones would be a prominent part of this project from the start, but at this point that does not seem to be the case,” Anderson said.
The common denominator among all three groups is that their teenagers have greater access to computers and are the most accomplished English speakers in their households.
With research complete, Anderson turned to plotting out content around four main areas, which he described as:
- Informational videos. The Karen refugees, especially, are new to electricity, refrigeration and housekeeping, having spent as much as two decades in camps on the Thai border. All groups also need help navigating job searches. The project plans to prepare a series of video projects, to be made available on its website, which can address these issues. The project may occasionally collect these into a DVD collection for community distribution.
- U.S., Nebraska and Lincoln culture. Early on, project leaders thought they would be telling many dramatic stories of these refugees’ lives before they arrived in Lincoln. They learned, however, that such stories are not interesting to other refugees. The refugees want to know who the Nebraskans are. One example: The disciplining of children is a recurring issue in the refugee communities. Many parents came from cultures where it is still permissible to strike a child, and several have gotten into trouble for acting in a way perfectly acceptable in their homelands. The project used this information to plan to create stories explaining U.S. culture and the differences the refugees might run into.
- Success stories. Refugees are interested in knowing how some people in their communities have been able to succeed, and the project will highlight some of their stories with short profiles.
- Other refugees. The refugees are also interested in their counterparts from other countries, so stories are planned on what the refugees themselves are up to by involving the refugees in telling their stories.
In addition, Anderson has arranged a partnership with the editor of the local daily, the Lincoln Journal Star, which will allow Mosaic to create weekly local briefs from material in the newspaper. “The refugees consistently told us they don’t read the local newspaper but they wish they had a better idea of what was going on locally,” he said. Mosaic plans to publish the column in English, Arabic and Karen, side by side, offering a simple English lesson at the same time.
Local agencies, including the Lancaster County and Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, have expressed enthusiasm for the site.
Lincoln’s New Voices: A Welcome Addition
September 2010
When launching a news site that covered the refugee community of Lincoln, Neb., professor Tim Anderson at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communications expected his team of students to be seen as unwelcome outsiders. Instead, Lincoln’s New Voices has been met with nothing but enthusiasm, he reports.
“Perhaps I am too cynical, but I really thought that at some point we would run into someone among the people who work with refugees in Lincoln who would ask us what we thought we were doing in trying to create media for the refugee community,” Anderson wrote. “I even had a response ready that touched on our state’s history with immigrants and such regional literary notables as Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz and John Neihardt.”
“Perhaps I am too cynical, but I really thought that at some point we would run into someone among the people who work with refugees in Lincoln who would ask us what we thought we were doing in trying to create media for the refugee community.” - Tim Anderson
But he didn’t need to use those facts. His team has been met with nothing but enthusiasm from officials, public schools and the refugees themselves, he noted. In fact, their conversations have led them to shift their major focus from stories “about” the immigrant community, to stories “for” thee.
Lincoln’s population of ethnic minorities and immigrants has grown 24 percent in recent years, a change that demands new forms of connecting and reporting. Students, community members and high school students from immigrant families are working with the university to provide mobile and web news to the growing minority audience.
Anderson and Phil Willet, an advertising instructor, decided to address the challenge by forming a college course entitled “Special Topics: New Voices.” The students are almost evenly divided between journalism and advertising majors and are combining their skills to conduct audience research in the refugee communities.
Since launching the course in August, Anderson has seen significant progress in gathering information from and about the three primary groups: Karen refugees from Burma, Iraqi refugees and Sudanese refugees.
First, Anderson and Willet earned the cooperation of Lincoln Public Schools representatives. The New Voices students were able to meet with three refugees in the English Language Learner classes - offered by LPS, these courses serve over 2,000 students from 51 countries, speaking 49 languages.
The three refugee liaisons came from the project’s target groups: Daniel Wal, from the Sudanese community; Wah Wah Moo, from the Karen community; and Mohammed Ainajen, from the Iraqi community.
“These three people, who have continued to be sources of information for our students, told fascinating stories of their own journeys to Lincoln,” Anderson says. “Ainajen, for example, responded when the first President Bush asked Iraqis to stand up and tell Saddam Hussein they wanted a new government. When the U.S. troops went home, Ainajen left Iraq and resettled in Nashville, Tenn., making his way to Lincoln three years later because he said he had heard there marriageable Iraqi women in Lincoln. He found this to be true and is now married and the father of three children.”
Students are learning not only from refugees themselves, but from Nebraskan professionals who work within the communities as well.
Karen Parde, refugee coordinator for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, talked to the New Voices class, providing the students with background on what her program does for refugees in Lincoln and throughout the state.
Kit Boesch, administrator for the Lancaster County Human Services Department and the New Americans Task Force in Lincoln, provided much useful assistance in locating community members who will become part of a focus group in preparation for audience research.
According to Anderson, all the officials the class has contacted regarding the project, including representatives from the governor’s office, have expressed great interest in the course and the news and information website they intend to create.
With cooperation comes collaboration: LPS and the New Americans Task Force are interested in becoming partners with the course’s website. Both see ways in which they can provide ongoing content for the site.
“It appears now that we may be of more assistance to [the refugees] by telling them about us rather than the other way around.” - Tim Anderson
Within the Lincoln Public Schools, students in ELL classes produce video podcasts that are streamed only on the LPS website, providing them with a very limited audience. In partnership with Lincoln’s New Voices, the podcasts would be streamed on the course’s website as well.
The New Americans Task Force, which encompasses more than 40 participating agencies and another ten human services agencies, is a network of public and private organizations and community members that serves to support new immigrants in the Lincoln area. According to Anderson, the Task Force has been trying, with limited success, to create and maintain a website, and members are excited about developing links between the course site and their own as a way of improving both.
Beginning in October, the New Voices students will be conducting focus group interviews in each of the three communities, starting with high school students.
Right now, the journalism students are creating text, video and audio content for the website and to use during the focus groups. According to Anderson, their current stories include:
* Department of Motor Vehicles: Because research indicates that transportation issues, particularly with cars, cause refugees high levels of discontent, one student is preparing a how-to video of the DMV experience.
* ELL Courses: A student is analyzing what the English Language Learner classes offer to the nearly 2,200 non-English speakers in the Lincoln Public Schools.
* Soccer: One student is looking at the universal sport of soccer and what it means to the Karen, Iraqi and Sudanese refugees in their new home.
* Nebraskan Culture: Students have found that refugees are interested more in the cultures of Lincoln, Nebraska and the Great Plains than in telling their own stories.
Anderson says this last story accounts for “the biggest surprise” they’ve encountered.
“We thought a side benefit of our project might be bringing the stories of the refugee communities to a wider audience among the dominant community,” he says. “It appears now that we may be of more assistance to [the refugees] by telling them about us rather than the other way around.”
However, their new discovery may provide more opportunities for partnership with outside sources. The NATF website is designed to bring the refugee story to the general Lincoln population and Boesch believes the two sites can work well together to provide both perspectives for the entire community. The Task Force site will bring news and information to the dominant population, while the Lincoln’s New Voices site will bring news and information to the refugees.
- Rachel Karas
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New Voices is an initiative of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. 