Over the last seven years, KUNR Public Radio has built its team and workflows to report news bilingually in English and Spanish. To get that news to the communities that need it, KUNR uses a combination of partnerships, digital tools, and in-person outreach to Spanish-speaking and Latino community members. America Amplified’s Paola Marizán spoke with KUNR’s Community Engagement Coordinator Natalie Van Hoozer about what they’ve learned along the way.

What was the main objective of the initiative when it was originally launched?

KUNR Public Radio started producing bilingual Spanish/English digital reporting in 2017 in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism’s Noticiero Móvil, a faculty-run, bilingual student newsroom at the University of Nevada, Reno. From the outset, the goal of this initiative was to make a long-term commitment to filling information gaps for the Spanish-speaking and Latino communities of Northern Nevada and Eastern California. We knew that KUNR’s expertise in audio reporting would be critical to provide news accessible to community members with varying literacy levels. 

How did the collaboration between America Amplified and your public media station help shape your public media coverage?

In 2020, KUNR started collaborating with America Amplified as part of America Amplified’s involvement with the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration of regional public radio stations which produce and share journalism about the Mountain West region.

Heading into the 2020 presidential elections, America Amplified’s coaching helped my bilingual colleagues and me experiment with engagement strategies that were new to us. America Amplified offered translation support for our scripts and materials for Facebook Live events in Spanish, on topics such as the reopening of schools and the voting process. 

America Amplified also connected me to other reporters at NPR member stations producing Spanish-language news for distribution via WhatsApp newsletters, including New Hampshire Public Radio’s ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire?

Those connections provided me with helpful context when I launched KUNR’s WhatsApp newsletter called Tu Voz (Your Voice) with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network LEDE Fellowship and the Online News Association MJ Bear Fellowship. 

Working with America Amplified during the 2022 midterm election cycle allowed KUNR to offer Hearken question submission forms for community members to share election-related questions. We distributed this form bilingually via the Tu Voz WhatsApp newsletter and on KUNR’s website and social media. We also collected election and other coverage questions via paper surveys in person, at community events.  

How is your station addressing local information needs through active listening and engagement?

Bilingual digital and in-person question submission forms are a key way KUNR creates content from community questions and feedback. KUNR’s participation in the Advancing Democracy program in 2022 and 2023 helped our team refine processes for asking for community input, producing coverage, and sharing it back out with those who took the time to engage with us. 

As part of that  Advancing Democracy program and as KUNR’s community engagement coordinator, I produced a bilingual FAQ and Content Guide about KUNR. These articles were a direct result of questions we receive regularly about the station from community members. 

I’ve also reported solutions-oriented stories about urban and rural air quality monitoring efforts because community members expressed concern about air quality in the region due to wildfires. These recurring climate-related questions were also the inspiration for KUNR’s candidate survey on the environment during the 2022 midterms. Now, in the 2024 election cycle, I am also producing listener-oriented bilingual content such as an FAQ about the Nevada presidential preference primaries and caucus. 

I also try to keep in mind that active listening and engagement with our Latino community should be consistent and not just an effort we make during election cycles. I’ve found it helps to build our relationship by asking community members to share their cultures. As an example, in a call for submissions on the Tu Voz WhatsApp newsletter and social media, respondents shared their holiday traditions with KUNR. I was then able to highlight the holiday festivities with stories about two Nevada residents from Mexico and Colombia. 

What challenges did your station face when trying to reach the community?

We recognize that consistency with our community presence and the content we produce are important elements to building trust with our Spanish-speaking and Latino communities. We don’t want our community to only hear from us when we need to ask them for something. In order to be that constant community presence, we’ve made it a priority at KUNR to build up our bilingual staff, so that we can produce bilingual content in-house and have staff present at community events who can interact with attendees in the language in which they are most comfortable. 

Expanding the number of bilingual staff at KUNR has been a priority for the station for several years. Until recently, our partnerships with other local media organizations were what allowed us to provide fresh news content in Spanish with a frequency useful for community members. Our more recent additions to our team are Managing Editor Vicki Adame, Reporter María Palma, and Membership Services Coordinator Niki Strataras, all of whom are bilingual. Together, we are able to offer bilingual outreach at events, in addition to bilingual reporting. We will soon be launching a Spanish-language weekly newscast on the air, which will be a tool for us to showcase more KUNR reporting in Spanish. 

We also regularly brainstorm how we can create an identity for KUNR that resonates with our Spanish-speaking and Latino audience members, and the wider community. We like to emphasize that KUNR is listener supported, so community members know that we’re not financed by government or corporate interests. 

How did your station partner with local organizations and community leaders to increase outreach efforts and build trust with the community?

Our KUNR strategy to promote engagement and build trust includes partnerships with media outlets and community organizations. Working with Noticiero Móvil was key in 2021 for One Small Step, a StoryCorps conversation program which our two organizations were the first to pilot in Spanish. In order to encourage community members to participate in the program, we also partnered with Nevada Humanities, Nevada’s independent, nonprofit state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We hosted two joint, virtual events related to civic dialogue and featured community leaders. 

KUNR’s Facebook Live events in Spanish in 2020 and 2021 focused on community experts, so that attendees could hear directly from them as opposed to content being filtered through reporters. 

We also focus on maintaining long-term partnerships with outlets such as The Nevada Independent en Español, which is a bilingual content partner. We participate in a content sharing partnership with Factchequeado as well, which is a nonprofit fact-checking organization combatting disinformation in Spanish in the U.S. Factchequeado helps us, as well as other outlets in the America Amplified community, to provide verifications and explainers in Spanish to our audiences with a small staff size. Providing this content helps build trust with our Spanish-speaking community members who are so frequently exposed to mis- and disinformation, especially about elections.  

What were the results of your station’s efforts to reach the community?

Across KUNR, our team recognizes that engaging our Spanish-speaking and Latino communities is a long-term project. We now have a base of subscribers on the Tu Voz WhatsApp newsletter, as well as community contacts supportive of the work we are doing. We plan to continue growing with the launch of our weekly Spanish newscast, which will air on KUNR and publish digitally. We’re moving into the next phase of increasing the frequency of our Spanish-language content and the related engagement activities connected to that reporting, such as feedback forms. As we go through this process, we know it will be important to maximize partnerships with media and community organizations.

How does this case study demonstrate the importance of actively listening and engaging with all communities to better serve their information needs

Our different engagement-focused projects for our Spanish-speaking and Latino communities show that active listening needs to happen on all kinds of topics, not just politics. Engaging community members on lighter topics, such as their holiday traditions, is a good way to promote trust and lay the foundation to then ask them to share their election-related questions. 

It’s also valuable to give your audience and the wider community the opportunity to submit questions that are more open-ended, so your reporting team can detect trends in the responses that they might not have considered otherwise. We saw the value in this approach with our 2022 Candidate survey on the environment project - we broadly asked what topics and questions community members had for candidates running for local government. The responses showed us that we should focus the project on air quality and water use concerns.

Anything else you would like to add for other stations to consider?

For stations interested in launching an initiative in a language other than English, trying out a new platform, or taking a new cultural approach to reporting with the community, it’s okay to start with a product that’s smaller than your ultimate goal. With the Tu Voz WhatsApp newsletter, at the beginning, I was a one-person team producing and distributing that newsletter on a monthly basis. I highlighted reporting from KUNR’s media partners to round out the content included. The goal was to increase KUNR’s presence on WhatsApp, and we are now reaching that point thanks to teamwork at KUNR to put together a weekly Spanish newscast. 

You can also launch a project with a small team, if you’re thoughtful about establishing community partnerships with organizations that have complimentary skills and goals. For the first several years of KUNR’s bilingual initiative, the partnership with Noticiero Móvil made the project possible. Noticiero Móvil reporters interned at KUNR, then went on to become professional staff at KUNR. Spanish-language editing support for KUNR also came from Noticiero Móvil for several years. The collaboration is what got our respective bilingual initiatives through the lockdown stages of the pandemic and the 2020 elections. We saw that the coverage we produced impacted our community in a positive way, as we shared critical public health updates. As a result, the collaboration won a national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2021 in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” category.