New Voices: 2007 Grantees: Bilingual Interactive Environmental Journalism

2007 Grantees

Bilingual Interactive Environmental Journalism

Donica Mensing, Director, Graduate Program in
Interactive Environmental Journalism, Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada - Reno
Reno, NV

CONTACT INFO

Reynolds School of Journalism
Mail Stop 310
University of Nevada Reno
Reno, NV 89557-6531
(775) 784-6531
E-mail

Web site

A Spanish language newsletter and Web site highlight issues of importance to the Latino population in North Lake Tahoe. Environmental concerns are just part of the challenges this community deals with; employment, economics, housing, and community cohesion are closely related. Several Latino residents are writing regularly for the publication, which is distributed in the Kings Beach and Incline Village communities.

Check back for future news and updates.

• August 2009
• August 2008
• March 2008
• November 2007

Bilingual Interactive Environmental Journalism from J-Lab on Vimeo..

2007 grantee Donica Mensing talks about getting the community involved in environmental journalism. This interview took place on April 5, 2008, at the New Voices 2007 Grantee Meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn in Washington, D.C.

Nuestro Tahoe Struggles with Contributors, Sustainability

August 2009

By Tom Regan

It’s a problem familiar to many community news sites - how to keep contributors contributing. After a very active first year, Nuestro Tahoe’s community news site has struggled to keep contributions coming.

“We have one primary Latino writer who has journalism experience,“ says project director Donica Mensing, who is also an Associate Professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno. “He was the one-person editor/reporter for a Spanish language newspaper in Reno but was recently laid off. He has helped the project since the beginning, but is now taking a more active role. We also have two active contributors from two different community organizations. Most of the contributors who started with us early on have either moved or gotten busy with other activities.“

Mensing notes that best way to get contributors is to talk face-to-face about what they want for their community, and then discover together how participating in Nuestro Tahoe can help them.

“Phone calls and e-mails haven’t been very effective at getting participation,“ she says.

Traffic to the Web site has also been disappointing. Early in the life of the project, Mensing and her team started producing a four-page newsletter, first in English and Spanish and eventually just in Spanish.

“We distribute 400 copies of our (mostly) biweekly publication throughout the community, and most are picked up,“ says Mensing. “This seemed to generate more attention and readership among our community than the Web site. We advertise the Web site in the newsletter but it has yet to generate much traffic. We need to do more work on our Web site to increase participation.“

Mensing says immigration has been the most popular issue examined, with poor housing conditions and health issues also generating interest.

Work in the area of immigration has been the most satisfying aspect of the project she says. Knowing that working immigrants in the community have an opportunity to participate in bringing issues to the attention of their neighbors is rewarding.

But while the work may be rewarding, Nuestro Tahoe is struggling with sustainability and long-term survival.

“There is a local foundation that would potentially be interested in contributing in the future,“ says Mensing. “We have kept them abreast of our progress and they have categories of funding that would be appropriate for future support. We had plans for advertising sales but haven’t had the personnel to get our ideas implemented.“

Mensing admits that she is most disappointed in Nuestro Tahoe’s ability to get more traction in the community.

“One significant barrier is not living in the community myself and having to commute an hour to get to meetings. The second disappointment is the rate at which people get interested and then disappear. I don’t feel we’ve yet found the right combination of nurturing, supporting and follow up that we need.“

Mensing knows that this problem with contributors will not come as a surprise, but it is a strong reminder again that a project like this takes a tremendous amount of commitment and follow-up.

“It’s difficult to do without having the day-in and day-out opportunities to interact with people and talk about the project. That said, when we hold regular meetings, people do come and they always express great appreciation for the idea and the opportunity to participate.“

Living La Vida Tahoe

August 2008

Nuestro Tahoe made its debut in the Spring of 2008. Billed as “A place for Spanish and English speakers in North Tahoe to work together on community issues that affect all of us,“ the Ning site functions as part newspaper, part social network, and part community service center. In May and June, the bilingual journalism project also published a free bi-weekly print edition with stories relevant to the local Latino community:

Kings Beach improvement plan voted down
Youth Take Charge to Make a Difference
Traditional Mexican Charreada Rodeo comes to Truckee
Garbage Problems in Kings Beach

Along with project leader and University of Nevada Reno journalism faculty member Donica Mensing, all of the content is written by community members, many of whom are immigrants from Latin America. The print publication aims to serve community members who may not have Internet access. One article discussed the parents’ role in children’s educational success; another featured an interview with the Deputy Sheriff.

The biggest story in May was the planned visit to Tahoe by famed labor activist Dolores Huerta, who worked alongside Cesar Chavez and leads the movement he started for farm workers’ rights.

Nuestro Tahoe also profiled a local “person of the week.“ In the May edition, it featured a short interview with Marcelo Castro, who has lived in Incline Village for 18 years. A proud father of two University of Nevada Reno graduates, Castro is a maintenance service worker and handyman, a member of the Lion’s Club, a square dancer and sculptor.

Now, Castro can also call himself “citizen journalist.“ The June 13 edition of Nuestro Tahoe featured a front-page article he wrote about a recent Boys and Girls Club fundraising event.

Nevando en Nevada
(Snowing in Nevada)

March 2008

Mother Nature proved a formidable competitor in the race to launch University of Nevada Reno’s Bilingual Environmental Journalism project, an eco-news initiative that aims to engage Lake Tahoe’s growing Latino community. UNR’s Donica Mensing says record snowfall made travel from Reno to Tahoe tougher than ever. “Roads are often closed and when they are open it can take two to three hours to make the journey in winter conditions. This has prevented us from making the in-person contacts we need to be successful.“

Despite all that, Mensing says the project is back on track, emerging from hibernation, and looking forward to a spring in full bloom. “While we regret the slow startup time, we are committed to the project and excited by the steps we are taking and response we are receiving from the community.“

Some of these steps include:

Working with a class of middle school students in Incline Village that is half-white and half-Hispanic. A graduate student will be meeting with the students weekly throughout the spring to guide them as they document each other’s lives. Some of that work will be published on OurTahoe.
Conducting four citizen journalism workshops for the King’s Beach community during March. These workshops will be in English with simultaneous Spanish translation. Attendees will be divided based on skills and experience, but organizers expect the first in the series to go over the basics of computer literacy and social networking. Subsequent workshops will cover creating short videos, taking photographs, and reporting: How to identify story ideas and sources.
Creating a Ning (social networking site) in Spanish for the participants of the workshops and north Lake Tahoe residents. “We hope this site will help them maintain contact with each other and begin an informal network that can be maintained over time,“ says Mensing.
Redesigning OurTahoe. Just recently the site moved from a Drupal-based to a Wordpress-based platform to make it easier for users to contribute content to the site and easier to offer a Spanish-language version of the site.
Getting ready to offer OurTahoe in Spanish, with the help of an automatic translator plugin - they’ve installed a Spanish/English widget - and human translators who are getting started translating stories into Spanish.
Distributing a simple newsletter in Spanish that summarizes the content on OurTahoe and the social networking site and provides citizen journalism tips from the workshops.

In its last report, UNR had decided to refocus the project on fire prevention and issues. But now, that issue sparked little interest among residents, so they’ve returned to their original focus of providing hyperlocal, bilingual and environmental news. Mensing says, “The residents we talk with are much more concerned about personal issues and immediate community problems related to development, education, health and housing. Our thinking now is that we will need to engage people with journalism on the issues they find most immediately relevant.“

Along the way, the UNR project will build some bridges of understanding between different communities. In a recent blog post on OurTahoe.org, the graduate student called “Nevada Journalist” explained the motivation behind his participation:

“As the immigration debate continues, it seems the gap between American-born citizens and immigrants, particularly Hispanics, widens ... Perhaps nowhere is the division so obvious as it is in Incline Village, where the rich are really rich, and the poor equally so ...

“As my project for this semester in the journalism graduate program at the University of Nevada, Reno, I will be working with ... a dozen seventh graders, equally split down ethnicity, and teach them the basics of journalism. They’ll photograph and write about their own lives, then work with each other to edit their work. In the process, I hope, they will learn something from and about one another. What it’s like to walk a mile in each other’s shoes, or zapatos, so to speak. And as they learn from one another, maybe we can learn something from them.“

Bilingual News: The Fire Next Time

November 2007

Initially, the Reynolds School of Journalism in Reno proposed to create a bilingual Web site that would serve the growing Hispanic population of Kings Beach, a small town on the shores of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. To that end, project coordinators met with several Hispanic community leaders in Kings Beach to learn more about the community and its interests.

Then came the Angora Fire, the largest forest fire in the Tahoe Basin in over a century. It destroyed 254 homes and 11 commercial buildings. The community was unprepared. Out of the ashes rose the phoenix of a new journalism project: a comprehensive online resource about catastrophic wildfire prevention.

Donica Mensing, Director of the Graduate Program in Interactive Environmental Journalism at UNR, says, “Our informants tell us [this issue] will dominate public conversation around the lake for quite some time. ... The Tahoe community will need to figure out how to prepare for the next catastrophic fire and, at the same time, how to reduce the chances that it will occur.“

So, the Bilingual News project has found itself a new niche and a sense of urgency.

“We see this discussion as a unique opportunity to test our ideas about the next form of journalism,“ says Mensing. “Progressive-era political institutions, which centered primarily on the role of expertise in policymaking, are today morphing into more interactive and democratic institutions ... the next form of journalism will facilitate this process. Lake Tahoe’s dilemma with respect to catastrophic wildfire represents a very good natural experiment for our ideas.“

As journalism students plunge into covering the aftermath of the Angora blaze, they will not ignore its effects on the Hispanic community at Lake Tahoe. “Hispanics represent a significant part of the labor force that will rebuild homes, reshape landscapes, and build defensible spaces. Hispanics also work on fire treatment crews and in the service industry in disproportionately large numbers. Any new policies touching on these activities will necessarily have a large impact on this community,“ Mensing says.

The fire illuminated another chronic problem: The lack of affordable housing in Tahoe, which is largely a resort community of second homes. Hispanics are the fastest growing segment of the workforce and least likely to be homeowners. Given the high cost of housing, these workers must often live far away from their jobs, which has implications during natural disasters.

Ourtahoe.org, a drupal-based community Web site, serves as the platform this coverage. Student reporters assigned specific fire-related beats will write stories, create multi-media packages, blog, facilitate online and face-to-face group discussions, and edit wiki pages on issues. A Spanish-fluent student will serve as a translator for other students when they interact with people in the community who are solely Spanish-speaking.

That student will also lead a spring semester project that will involve holding citizen journalism workshops for Hispanic residents, working with them to publish their content on the Ourtahoe.org site.

The project will offer a Spanish-language version of the site and will hire a fluent Spanish-language editor to translate English stories and field queries from the Latino community about this edition. As members of the Tahoe community are recruited and invited to post stories and blogs, that editor will translate Spanish postings to English.

Finally, the project is inviting students at South Lake Tahoe High School to blog about their family’s experiences as a result of the fire and document what Lake Tahoe means to them.

Since re-focusing the project on the fire, Mensing says they’ve recently had a bit of a reality check, that fire and other environmental issues are not such pressing concerns for many people they hope to reach. “They have talked with us about youth problems (delinquency, drug use), immigration problems, health problems, work-related problems,“ says Mensing. “When we mention that environmental issues affect every other issue at the Lake, they fail to see the connection.“ So, the UNR team is beginning to reassess its ideas, thinking about the role of journalism in educating, setting the agenda or responding to community needs.

The UNR folks have also decided that since Internet access in the Hispanic community is largely confined to libraries and schools, they will distribute a printed newsletter version of the Web site in order to reach that community.

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