Revolutionizing bilingual journalism

Irene Romulo of Cicero Independiente on empowering Latine staff and communities to thrive and be seen

In 2019, Cicero Independiente was born out of a necessity for independent bilingual news coverage for communities of color in Chicago's southwest suburbs. 🤳 Founded by Cicero residents turned journalists, the initiative aimed to address the critical lack of investment in local, accessible journalism.

Irene Romulo, one of the co-founders, began this journey with a simple yet powerful approach — circulating a flyer asking residents about their lives in Cicero. Early conversations shaped the editorial priorities and mission of Cicero Independiente. 🧭 It is a news organization intended to truly reflect the needs of its community.

Irene's vision attracted others with similar aspirations. Together, they believed that a bilingual, independent news outlet was essential for fostering transparency and accountability in local government. 🗺️ In addition, they were determined to create journalism that not only informed but also empowered the immigrant community by providing the tools and skills necessary for civic engagement.

Their efforts culminated in a successful launch event in the fall of 2019. I talked with Irene in a March 2021 OIGO, about Cicero Independiente and its vision. 🚨 We wanted to share an update.

A strong community connection has been a cornerstone of the outlet’s work, allowing the team to transition from a volunteer-run organization to a structured entity with full-time staff and a dedicated steering committee. Cicero Independiente continues to grow, but with intention and a steadfast commitment to its values. 🛎️ As they navigate the challenges of running a nonprofit newsroom, they remain focused on creating a supportive and inclusive environment for both their staff and their community. It’s a remarkable story of success.

In this interview, Irene Romulo shares insights into their journey, and the continuous effort to ensure their work remains impactful for the residents they serve. 👇

In 2021, you were working through editorial, vision and building the organization. It seems like you're at this really wonderful point.

The last time we spoke, our digital editor and myself had just started. I had come on as staff. Since then, there’s been a lot of growth, but it’s been very intentional growth — at least for us, as a smaller organization. Now thankfully we have four full-time employees. Plus, we just brought on a part-time reporter who's focusing on building out our school and youth beat. An education focus we feel really elevates the voices of young people in the room.

We've taken the time to think through what positions we need; or the people that can fill those roles; how we can sustain our work; and what it looks like, without just producing for the sake of producing.

In addition, we’re focusing on the process and building an organization that both treats us well and treats our community well. All of us have had different experiences at other jobs and other nonprofits where we haven't been treated well; our health hasn't been prioritized; or where paying ourselves hasn't been prioritized. We’re really figuring out how we can embed those values into our work, so that we can be an organization that sticks around for the long haul or for as long as we're needed, and we're not just growing for the sake of growing.

What was the process thinking through the roles that you needed? And how did you come to the outcomes in the decisions that you did?

We sought outside support to guide us through different efforts, like staff retreats where we've had conversations about where we're at. We’ve also devoted time to thinking about what we have capacity for and what we want to do in the future.

We also heard from many people, which informed what we might want to continue. One example of that is our community wants to know what's going on our schools. So, we considered that maybe we need to use in-school reporters. These discussions shaped the thinking that formed the position that we just hired for, as well as some of our other positions we've thought about. Asking ourselves what is it that we need in this moment, and how is that going to bring us forward into the future, are core questions. We’re also pushing ourselves to ask who do we know, because we're interested in developing the leadership of people who live here.

In our growth, we still try to maintain our community. We’re always making sure we're still talking to community residents going to meetings, taking a look at what other organizations locally are doing, and knowing we need to stay present because it informs our decision making. It's tough as a smaller organization — trying to practice shared leadership and decision-making all the way. To even figure out how to do that while balancing our products that we're putting out there can get difficult sometimes

How have you overcome some of those challenges?

As our team grows, it has been challenging to figure out how April and myself, as co-founders, let go of things that we're holding on to from the beginning; so we ensure that other people have this space to to take that work on and to have the ability to make decisions and influence the organization without just deferring to us. As the co-founders, those are power dynamics that need to be analyzed and, if we want to change, we need to address this as a team. So, at least naming that, putting that out there, and making sure that we're figuring out even how to do the work.

In addition, our team meetings strive for everybody to have a space to give their opinion about stuff. Everybody has been equipped with the background knowledge to be able to have input. Even when we've come up with our operating budget, we do that as a team, but that requires people having at least like a basic understanding of budgets and what it means, what expenses are, what income is, and where that's coming from. All of that is time that we need to invest in preparing and helping each other out, so that we can come to the table equipped to make decisions together.

Those issues are challenging because they take time, and they take time that would otherwise be spent on doing reporting or other work.

As a founder, there's a lot on your shoulders, but it seems like you had to understand that, for this to grow, you have to widen that circle to some extent.

It's been something we've talked about since the beginning — knowing that all of us have different aspirations and dreams that aren't just related to Cicero Independiente. While we want to see this organization grow and flourish, we also understand that we need to be able to make space for other voices to join in and to have ownership over the organization in order to really feel like this is theirs and it can transform to meet the needs of a community.

Cicero is also changing right now. It's a predominantly Latinx community, but that doesn't mean we're a monolith. It's changing as people from Central and South America are coming to town. We see it even in the kinds of Spanish dialects that are spoken in the streets and the kind of information that people are looking for. Our community is always changing. The needs are always changing. Organizations should be flexible in being able to meet those needs.

It's possible for us to think though this now because we're small, but maybe that's what's needed here in this moment. Even talking to our fiscal sponsors at City Bureau and seeing how they've been succession planning has been helpful to see. Our conversations with the Listening Post Collective have helped us determine what are the the roles or the tasks that should remain in our hands, and which ones are things that we can let go of.

Similarly for us, it's been always really important to mirror the kind of investment that other people made in our own development. Other people, organizations and individuals contributed to me even being able to see myself as a journalist and see myself as a founder of an organization. That's what we're trying to do for other people here in Cicero, so that they don't have to go outside of town to have the same kinds of opportunities that we had.

Where do you feel like the organization's biggest opportunities are right now?

We've been feeling good about developing what we have now, but there's always room for growth. Not just growth in like, ‘we need 20 staff,’ but growth in terms of deepening the work that we're doing. For example, we're finishing off a project that we started in fall of 2022 and, last year more intensely, with Muckrock. It's a collaborative investigative project that looks at air quality in our town, and that has shown us the possibility of what it would look like to have more investment in this kind of investigative reporting that includes residents to make things more accessible. Community-led investigative reporting, is a big opportunity for us that takes resources and time, but we end up seeing like how important it is.

It’s been invigorating to see more organizing around environmental justice issues in the area. We have a lot of opportunity to increase our coverage in Berwyn, which is another area that we cover but not as deeply as in Cicero. I’d like to see us bring in more people from the area who may not necessarily have a journalism background, but who are interested in creating an organization that meets the needs of the people who live here.

We want to continue figuring out how an organization grows and how we continue to develop leadership models that are more collaborative and work with other newsrooms as much as we can, as well as with organizations in town to create something that is bigger than what we could do alone.

This is a conversation that we had a couple of years ago where the project is trying to figure out how to involve the community who may not have the journalism experience, but has a lot of passion.

We have an editor who has been able to work more one-on-one with people who are interested in reporting, want to learn, and have all of those creative juices and ideas and the energy, but maybe not necessarily the skills. We teach people how to interview someone, for example. But we also try to find other ways for people to support our work and to still bring in all their skills and talents.

One experience we had was our end-of-the-year fundraising in 2022. We created for the first time a community fundraising committee of people who had reached out to us, wanting to help us raise money. We hosted a committee again last year to help us because it was so successful.

What was great about that is that our goals weren't just about meeting a specific monetary amount. Our goals were also about how to create a space that fosters more community involvement and strengthens our relationships with people. Out of that, people were able to use their art skills to create their own fundraisers for us or raffled off items that they had collected. Somebody sold a Cicero-themed shirt and shared the profits with us last year. We hosted our first-ever in-person fundraising events and we were able to share the profits with two other community organizations. We featured a local youth band and another couple of local artists to try to meet the goal.

We want our spaces to foster community relationships and community building through our news, so those have been other ways that we've been able to figure out how to involve people.

Our last reporting fellowship program was an intergenerational cohort of both monolingual English speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers; and it required some work on our end of having interpreters, but it was a really good way to be able to again provide journalistic opportunities for people who otherwise wouldn't have them. Some participants never really saw themselves as journalists. So that program specifically and everything that has come out of it is something that I'm very proud of.

What do you feel like the organization learned through the fellowship?

We weren't expecting it to have a lot of monolingual Spanish speakers apply for it. Initially, we removed the word ‘youth’ from the application because, in the past, we called it a youth reporting fellowship. This time we wanted to encourage more people to apply. When we saw that we had a lot of monolingual Spanish speakers who applied, we said, ‘okay now we have to pivot and we need to figure out how to have this program excel.’ We had to find the budget to have interpreters; to have every one of our sessions to be facilitated like dialogue between people; to translate, and have all of our materials and curriculum be available in both languages.

People who participate also come in at different levels of comfort with the written language. So instead of making our reporting fellowship one where we produce articles, we chose a medium that was perhaps more accessible to everybody. We chose photojournalism and audio journalism. Some of the fellows were really interested in in that, and it's how we were able to accommodate and make this space more open.

From the program, we produced this magazine that's full of images of Cicero, looking at it through an environmental justice lens because that's what the residents were really interested in. And one example of how accessible it was was that the magazine was recently used at a school event with kindergartners and third graders. You could see the little kids looking through it, looking at the map, finding their houses, and things that they recognize and just feeling good about seeing people like them in this beautiful print format.

It was so worth it to go through the operational challenges. We still had a couple of hiccups here and there, but it worked out fine.

What do you wish you would have known from the last time we talked?

Don't do things alone. It can be very lonely to feel like you have to figure everything out by yourself because your whole community is dependent on it because, if you didn't exist, there's nothing else that's around here. That's a big load to carry, so it's easier when you're doing it with other people — whether it is friends who are interested in supporting or finding mentors or other journalists or media people who have done this and can provide support. A lot of things have already been done and have been put out there so we don't need to replicate, but instead just ask for support.

Rest is important. That was something we were intentional about putting in our handbook, that all employees are eligible for a month-long paid sabbatical after three years of employment. We want people to take the time to rest and refuel. As co-founders, we’ve come back full of ideas and energy and things we want to do and reflections. It's been nice to do that, but it hasn't been a lesson that I always apply. It's difficult when the to-do list is seems never ending and there's always something else to add, but I can't overemphasize the value of rest. 🟢

Cafecito: stories to discuss ☕

• Greater Public's follow-up survey on DEI practices within public media is here. The importance of creating inclusive workplaces that foster open communication is key to attract and retain diverse staff is among key points. 🔓

• Columbia Journalism Review looks at La Periodista de Iowa, a rural publication attacking Spanish-language misinformation through relationships. 🧵

• The Midwest Newsroom, Latino News Network and Hortencia Zavala Foundation have partnered to hire an intern to support news coverage. ⛽

• While we’re dealing with a lot of public media stress, the Institute for Nonprofit News suggests there are areas to be inspired by, including the enduring stability of nonprofit news organizations. 🪂

• The Hispanic Radio Conference concluded this week in San Antonio. 🚀 Most sessions were devoted to music and advertising, but the sessions also featured discussions on voting, the NALEO Education Fund and NAB’s efforts to dispel misinformation and more. You can follow postings from the event with the hashtag #hispanicradioconference24 on social media.

• The Pivot Fund caught up with rural Georgia’s Courier Eco Latino on the growth and challenges the outlet is experiencing as it serves residents. 🦋 Changes in editorial, its newsletter and fundraising are yielding results.

El radar: try this 📡

• Elevate Latinx LGBT voices. 🌈 It’s Pride month, and you possibly have many events happening in your area. WUFT covered a panel on Hispanic identity in this community. It could be a good story to localize.

• Investigate pharmacy gaps in Latine neighborhoods. Pharmacies, from chains like CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid, as well as independent ones, are a critical healthcare resource. 🩼 KANW reposted an Associated Press analysis, which reveals a reduced presence post-pandemic, with urban areas predominantly inhabited by Black and Latino populations having fewer pharmacies per capita. Alaska, Oregon and New Mexico have the fewest retail pharmacies overall.

• See about salvadoreños and U.S. voting. KQED has a great story asking local Salvadoran Americans about law-and-order policies in the U.S. races they’ll also cast ballots in. 🎇 Salvadoreños in America overwhelmingly voted for tough-on-crime President Nayib Bukele in February.

• Or talk about voting and new Americans. Youth voting is grabbing headlines, but Little Rock Public Radio covers a bloc we rarely hear about. 🪑 Newly naturalized citizens will vote for president for the first time this year, and they have many visions for the country.

• Ask about Hispanic-serving institutions near you. KPBS highlights needs. The federal Hispanic Serving Institutions grant program is designed to foster a campus that makes students feel encouraged to pursue graduation. 👨‍🎓 While these grants provide up to five years of funding—with the possibility of renewal—developing sustainable programs that continue to support students after the initial grant period ends are a topic of conversation.

• Share Latinx history in your state. WORT recently had a program on the story of Latinos in Wisconsin during the early 1900s. 🏫 It’s a fascinating dialogue, and one you could tell about your area.

• Equip local leaders around Spanish-language disinformation. I wish a public media organization had done this! 🦾 Florida nonprofit We Are Más created templates for community leaders to share on messaging apps related to falsehoods that spread on WhatsApp and similar platforms.

La próxima ⌛

The next OIGO arrives July 12. The plan is to share café with Keyris Manzanares, bilingual multimedia journalist at VPM News. She’s one of our voices on the rise, and has many great insights.

Next week, I have AI talks that you’re invited to attend, including Thursday for Public Media Innovators and a workshop for Listening Post Collective on Friday. ⚡

I’ll be in Fort Worth the week of July 15 as part of the Maynard 200 faculty. 🌊 I came through the program in 2019, so it’s an honor to support the leaders this year. If you’re in the Dallas/Fort Worth region that week, reach out and let’s meet.

🥤 You can buy me a coffee if you’d like to support the newsletter.