When COVID-19 arrived in the United States in the spring of 2020, stations working on community engagement efforts were faced with a challenge – stop their efforts completely or move from real world to digital events.

One station in Nevada found a way to build upon previous efforts, leverage partnerships, and create new opportunities to focus on a growing segment of its community.

Growing and underserved

According to the 2010 Census, about 24% of households in the Reno, Nevada, area are of Hispanic or Latin American heritage, an increase of about 6% since the 2000 Census. While an ethnic background does not automatically mean Spanish is the primary language in the home, it does mean there’s a population there with information needs.

“We know that there’s a large news gap between what’s available in English and what’s available in Spanish. We have a couple, local Spanish language newspapers but they have small teams and there are few daily news sources in Spanish [in the Reno area]. Traditional outlets are not really serving the needs of the community,” said Natalie Van Hoozer, a bilingual reporter at KUNR who started working in Spanish language at the station while a student.

Text and audio reporting in Spanish are currently offered on the KUNR’s website. The station formalized bilingual reporting through a student internship program in 2016 with Noticiero Móvil, a student staffed bilingual newsroom at the University of Nevada-Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism.

“That program in 2016-2017 was really focused on event journalism. We’d have different listening parties with the community where we would set up in a room at a restaurant in town, invite different community members to come listen to our stories and ask questions, and offer suggestions for things that we could cover. With the pandemic all that [in person work] has pretty much dwindled,” said Van Hoozer.

Reopening schools and election information via Facebook Live

Engaging local Spanish speakers in the digital space started to take shape in the late summer of 2020. Van Hoozer and her team, along with help from the Mountain West News Bureau, produced a series of Facebook live events in Spanish around COVID-19 and the reopening of schools as well as a discussion about the voting process in the 2020 election. (Check out this tip sheet on how to stream a talk show on Facebook Live.)

The two live discussions not only provided critical information but also a platform where Spanish speaking people could get answers to their questions about both topics.

Van Hoozer says it is important to take the time to do enough outreach to bring the audience to these discussions. “I’ve tried not to do it in less than three weeks because of that outreach component. I know that we need time to send out emails to community members and do individual follow up with different people to try to make sure that we’re reaching an audience.”

Van Hoozer also explained that promotional materials and graphics need to be created in both languages. On the day of the event, she produced an event script and sent out questions in advance to guests so they were prepared for the discussion.

“If we did get questions [during the event] then we would pivot to those and I’d direct those to the right guest on the spot. We knew we wanted our events to be at least a half an hour in order to give people time to trickle in and we really didn’t want it to be more than an hour,” Van Hoozer explains.

Building partnerships to drive engagement

Partnerships are critical to building not just an audience but goodwill and long-term communication between a newsroom and a community that has not typically been top of mind for a station. KUNR partnered with Latinos de Nevada for the first Spanish language event and then with the Nevada Independent’s Spanish page for the second one.

“Part of it was trying to find community organizations to partner with that also have a presence virtually to help reach their audience and, hopefully, more Spanish speakers that way. We made sure to set it up so that the Facebook live event was cross streamed on our page and our event partner’s page so that both audiences would get a notification that the page was live for an event,” says Van Hoozer.

KUNR also worked to promote the event through the social media accounts of the speakers highlighted in the events. They printed out flyers and shared them throughout the community. They worked with Noticiero Móvil to compile a list of community members who might be interested and sent out email blasts in English and Spanish a week or so before the event, and followed up a day before and the day of. 

Consistency builds community

One-off events are far less effective in terms of engagement than consistent, scheduled events that demonstrate to the community that the newsroom is seeking to engage over the long term.

Moreover, newsrooms should have a clear idea of who they want to reach and why: “I would recommend any station or news director have a clear, consciously thought out motivation for why you want to do this outreach. I’ve found it easier to find people who would be a good fit [as guests] if we know exactly what purpose we want the event to serve. So being very intentional about that I think is important and, in my experience, even more so with work in Spanish because we have a community here that’s battling misinformation in Spanish being sent on social media,” said Van Hoozer.

The results of this kind of engagement may not be immediate.

“We’re trying to offer a service to community members who would not expect to get this kind of information from us. Even now a lot of people who speak Spanish would never think to go to their local NPR station for any news in Spanish. It’s just not part of NPR’s identity or English language radio. So even though it’s been a couple years we know there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done as far as reaching people and then seeing that in a cyclical pattern of coming back to us as far as with engagement and feedback. [KUNR’s Station Manager and News Director] understand this is a long haul process that we are working on,” said Van Hoozer.