When our newsroom at WNIN first discussed expanding our coverage to Spanish-speaking communities, the intention was to become a trusted news source for those communities. We felt we were headed in the right direction but we didn’t fully understand the Latino/a/e/x community in the Midwest. And that — acknowledging that we didn’t know anything about them — was the first step to reaching out to a “new” community. 

It’s crucial for your community engagement to get to know the audience you are trying to reach — to understand their needs, their listening habits, and what type of content engages them — before you create the content or start thinking about story ideas. And with the help of a grant and training from PRX we were able to look for resources and opportunities that supported this research process. 

So here’s what we did:

• We asked the community through polls, surveys, in-person and online, where they got their news. We surveyed more than 1,000 people over a period of a year. We created a system to track all the answers, on google sheets for example. We found our audience was mainly on Facebook. That also happens to be where most Spanish-speakers get their online news. Make sure you create a system that tracks all these answers; like Google sheets. That enabled us to FIND THE RIGHT PLATFORM.

• We talked to community leaders, like healthcare experts, local immigration advocates, and church leaders, that worked closely with the Spanish-speaking community. They were key to learning more about what the community was dealing with locally and this is how we discovered that there was no local bilingual coverage. This showed us that ONE PERSON CAN BE A GATEWAY TO THE BROADER COMMUNITY.

• Based on our findings, we decided to create a podcast because our audience told us they preferred content they can listen to on-demand. We also decided to make it a bilingual podcast because our target audience is millennials who can move easily between two languages. And finally, we decided that the content would focus on creating a sense of community and inspiring change in the Midwest. We CREATED CONTENT BASED ON THE COMMUNITY’S WANTS AND NEEDS.

Having taken these steps, not only did we establish our newsroom as a trusted source BECAUSE we learned about the community beforehand, but we also fostered a community of listeners that turned into supporters and donors. 

Today, WNIN’s bilingual podcast, ¿Qué Pasa, Midwest?, has more than 10,000 followers on Facebook where we continue to reach and engage with our audience. By meeting the Latin/a/e/x community where they were already engaging with content, the show has found ongoing success and support with more than 70,000 downloads in the past year.