Midterm Elections brought a new opportunity for community partnerships and fresh voices at Maine Public

Photos by Sofia Aldinio of the Portland Press Herald via Maine Public

Since 2021, Maine Public has been broadcasting multilingual newscasts, allowing them to form deep connections within the state’s immigrant and refugee communities. Through those new relationships, reporters have been able to elevate stories that better reflect the experiences of Mainers. During the midterm elections, they knew they needed to continue to meet the information needs in these communities, so reporters Miles Brautigam and Ari Snider started listening. Here’s what issues young immigrant voters told them were most important, and how a key partnership helped get the story in front of a broader audience.

Tell us who you are, and share a brief summary of the reporting project?

Maine Public wanted to hear from young immigrant voters about their views on politics heading into the midterm elections, so we brought together a group of four people to talk politics in a Zoom call. We collaborated with the Portland Press Herald on this project, one of their photographers took photos of the participants. 

How did community engagement inform your reporting? 

We (Miles Brautigam and Ari Snider) reached out to a number of groups that we have been in contact with through the community engagement outreach meetings to recruit participants. All four participants were people that we had met in person before. 

How did you build trust in the community you were reporting on?

We have been reaching out to numerous groups working in immigrant communities over the last year and a half, and have done our best to convey and demonstrate our sincere interest in the views, opinions, and concerns that have come up across dozens of conversations. I think that helped get people to agree to participate in this event to begin with. During the group interview itself, we asked open-ended questions, listened intently, and then produced radio and digital stories that sought to accurately reflect the views of the participants. The feedback we got from the participants, both after the interview and after the stories were published, was very positive. 

How are you bringing this reporting back to the community?

We shared the story link with the participants, some of whom said they were going to share it further within their communities. We offered participants to keep a digital copy of the photographs taken by the Press Herald photographer. And we included an abridged, translated version of the interview in our News Connect newsletter (translated into French, Portuguese, Somali, Arabic, Khmer, and Spanish). 

What lessons do you take away from this project in terms of strengthening your engagement?

We think this was a compelling model for engagement-focused journalism, and would like to do more stories like this in the future. One lesson that I (Ari) took is that it’s important to give these projects enough time, especially when it comes to recruiting participants. We had to move fairly quickly on this one, to pull it together before the midterms. In the future I would like to approach these projects with a more flexible timeline, so we can do our best to reach people who may not be able to attend an event like this on short notice.