The Nevada Independent is facing the same big challenge as lots of other publications in the southwest and in major cities across the country: serving a rapidly growing population that’s been traditionally underserved by media outlets.
Jannelle Calderon, who covers Hispanic community and culture for the Independent, says that in Nevada, 30% of the population is Latino and in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, the school district is half Latino. She thinks about the future of the publication, which launched in 2017, when she talks about those growing demographics.
“Those (children) are eventually going to become adults and get into the news,” she said. “The Hispanic adult population is just going to keep growing in Clark County. We’ve seen it grow in northern Nevada as well.”
But the staff is small, and the four-person team that puts together a Spanish-language version of the Independent’s website is even smaller. Much of its content is translated from the English versions of news stories. It’s a lot of work and, as at virtually any publication today, resources are tight.
In the two and a half years that Calderon has worked at the Independent, she noticed that one of the obstacles to getting some of these translated stories to a wider audience was that there was no way to easily link the English and Spanish versions automatically.
“We were doing that manually on every single story we would post,” Calderon said. “We were like, ‘How do we connect the English and Spanish side together?’”
A Spanish-language story might be one that a reader would want to share with family members who speak English or vice versa. But making the process of alerting readers that both versions are available without lots of extra work took some doing. Calderon decided to take on the challenge as her innovation project for the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. She worked with the Independent’s chief technical officer CJ Keeney to add a WordPress plugin that would add a post-story tag to both versions of an article, allowing readers to click between them. In English, the tag reads, “This story has been translated to Spanish. You can read it here.”
Calderon said she was inspired by the way The Texas Tribune handles stories in both languages. The plugin project, which is simple but saves lots of time, has made the Independent’s website more navigable for readers who may be straddling both languages. “Our readers have different levels of bilingualism. It’s more easily shareable and accessible.”
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Kata Golvala, an investigative reporter at The CT Mirror, promoted the publication’s Spanish-language-translated stories as an innovation project for the 2022-2023 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. (Courtesy: Katy Golvala)
At the CT Mirror, investigative reporter Katy Golvala has also been plugged into the publication’s efforts to reach more Spanish-speaking readers.
In 2021, she said, the Mirror began publishing about an article a week in Spanish with translation help from Identidad Latina, a Hartford-based Spanish-language media outlet. Over time, Golvala said, the types of articles being offered in Spanish shifted to translations of CT Mirror Explains, condensed versions of longer public-policy stories.
“We thought, here’s a focused offering that we can provide that we really think would be additive to the Spanish-language coverage here in the state,” Golvala said.
When Golvala was choosing an innovation project for the Poynter-Koch fellowship, she decided that getting the word out about CT Mirror en Español’s work would be a worthwhile way to help the stories reach a wider audience. By the time she started, the news summaries had been going for a while and ready to be promoted.
“My biggest fear was we could get started and say, ‘Oh my God, look at what we’re doing!’ and then we’d run out of resources,” she said. But once the pieces had a reliable track record, Golvala said she knew that some outreach could help make it even more successful. “We’d figured out a content strategy that really makes sense. We’d stuck with it for seven months … now, let’s think about distribution.”
Golvala reached out to local radio talent, sought community feedback on the types of stories readers were looking for in Spanish with a questionnaire and had one-to-one conversations with community leaders. She put together some targeted outreach including an email to readers and more entry points on the English site for Spanish-language readers. In some fellowship cross-pollination, Golvala has also been speaking with Calderon about adopting the WordPress tool that would allow automatic cross-linking of English and Spanish versions of stories.
The goal overall for CT Mirror’s efforts was to serve the roughly 414,000 Connecticut residents who speak Spanish by making them more aware of a high-quality product aimed at their communities. Golvala said that often companies, as well as news outlets, start projects like this only to let them die over time. She was determined not to let that happen.
“It’s just about priorities,” she said. “I wanted to make sure this stayed a high priority and that we could really see it through.”
This story is part of a series profiling innovation projects from the 2022-2023 Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. The projects were presented at a May summit in Washington, D.C.
