Getting people who look like me engaged
Getting people who look like me engaged
Obed Manuel puts his reporting skills to work around audiences for Colorado Public Radio
The Great Resignation has sparked many debates about public media and people of color. Talking with Obed Manuel, I am reminded of a nuance to the matter. Sometimes, doors open for other things you aspire to do.
This moment is a unique one for Latino/a/e/x public media professionals. There is unprecedented focus on recruitment and retention. There are also for-profit companies (see Vox, CNN) offering great money and opportunities to diverse voices from the public media system. At the same time, many media organizations have not entirely found their way; their notions of roles may not be developing as quickly as workforce expectations are. However, some organizations are pivoting to today’s needs. They and employees are reaping the benefits.
A talent like Obed Manuel, to me, stands out as representative of those professionals that big-picture public media can attract.
Obed Manuel works as an audience editor for Colorado Public Radio. He is a former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, where he covered immigrant communities, immigration policy, inequality, poverty, City Hall and local news. Obed grew up in Dallas' Oak Cliff neighborhood. He now lives in Aurora, Colorado with his wife April, their three-week-old son Lucas, and their pets, Pebbles and Mozart.
Herein, we talk about his career change and the value of diverse perspectives in the new workplace. 👇👇👇
At the Dallas Morning News, you did a lot of award-winning journalism and could have gone to any newspaper you wanted. Why did you choose to join public media?
As soon as I announced that I was leaving the Dallas Morning News, I got a lot of calls. I didn't really realize that I was on people's radar that way. But I left the Morning News mainly because I wanted to do more. I wanted to write opinion pieces and share my perspective. I was told that there wasn't room for that. So, I said, ‘okay, I have to go.’ And for a while there, I wasn't sure what the next step was.
My current boss found me on Twitter. He read a bunch of the stuff that I was up to. And he read some of my past work, contacted me, and was like, ‘I have a job that I think you might be interested in.’
I had done a little bit of audience work as a reporter, and I understood the value of it. It’s a way to condense information of use to people and put it in front of them. It’s also a means to build bridges with communities that we've struggled with as an organization to reach. That, to me, has always been my career goal: to get more communities reading and listening to accurate news.
To be told you can come here and have an impact, not just on the community but also in the newsroom? That was it for me. I was pretty sold on that combination of possibilities.
What has it been like getting to know the community in this transition?
My approach has always been to be there at the community meetings. Then you have a relationship with somebody who lives in a neighborhood that you're trying to cover. With the past two years, it's been harder to do that, mainly because there aren't a lot of community meetings in person. So, it's building digital relationships with some organizations that work here in Colorado. My concern is always the people who don't know Zoom or who don't have jobs like ours; or sit and consume news all day. It's the dads who work construction jobs but make time to go to PTA meetings. Those people don't tend to go to virtual community meetings.
How do you think civic life has suffered during the pandemic, to your point about the digital space maybe excluding people?
It's hard to know like what this is going to look like at the end. I think back to the Census, before 2020. There were all these community meetings in Dallas that I used to go to, to get a sense of what does the canvassing for the Census look like around the neighborhoods that I'm covering. And I wonder now, are those spaces going to exist? Or are we going to switch over to a virtual style of approaching people, that is going to be exclusive? There's a limitation at this point.
What is your day-to-day like in your current role, and how do you feel about its impact on the community?
It's hard to measure, especially because most of my work at this point is definitely looking at metrics and looking at Google Analytics and looking all these things. Where we see reach is in with people sharing our stories. I remember a while back, a reporter did a story about housing in the mountains. and there's this whole situation there with short-term rentals, bumping up the prices. He did this amazing story about how the industry workers who serve the local economy didn't have a place to live because it was too expensive. When I looked at where the story was being shared, it was on the local community Facebook groups.
That's what part of my day to day is: trying to see the impact. Where are stories being shared? Are people returning to the site? Is it your local visitors? For example, we can put out a story about Lauren Boebert, and 30,000 readers from outside the state come in. However, 10,000 readers can click on a story that is very Colorado focused and those readers to a degree are more valuable to us because they're local and they're much more invested in the local news angle.
Once you start parsing it out, it's like, ‘okay, did they click on another story?’ ‘Are they interested in the content that we're putting out?’ And it's like sometimes the stories that have a smaller audience tend to be more effective than the ones that get 50 to 80,000 clicks.
How you feel your journalism experience influences the work that you're doing right now?
I'd be remiss in saying I don't miss reporting. I do. That's how you meet real people who are our neighbors and are the people who your kid might go to school with. Your family shares a space with these folks.
The way that it's informed my work here is mainly being a little bit more attuned. Sometimes like, ‘hey, have you thought about this?’ ‘Have you thought about the possibility that these folks might not want their full names in a story?’
We wrapped up a housing series at the end of last year, and one of the stories looked at the impact high housing prices and the pandemic had on unauthorized immigrants in the city. It's a context that I understood, which is like, when you don't have a Social Security number, you don't have access to a litany of things, such as federal resources that arose over the past few years. You didn't get stimulus checks. You're not eligible for unemployment from the federal government. There's so much at play here. Knowing that context and just having that knowledge helped me. It put into perspective that story that I've worked on as a reporter.
These are stories of not just, ‘look at these poor immigrant folks who lost their jobs.’ Instead we need to look at how they lost their jobs, but also how they were shut out of all these other resources. I am waiting a little bit for an opportunity to put more of that knowledge to use here.
Is representation the biggest priority to you for public media organizations?
I think it's probably the biggest point for me. At least it was before and it is now, and it's always going to be, Again, just because those shared experiences help us build relationships. And when you have a relationship, it's easier to build trust. And when you have that trust, it's easier to go to somebody and be like, ‘hey, I have this newsletter that we send out every day,’ you know?
The other point is public media is fantastic and I've been a fan of it since I was a kid. But we need to make sure that we understand the biggest possible audience that we have is online.
So the radio is great, but we have to think about how we put those stories that we have on the radio elsewhere. How do we make sure that they look good and that they're easy to read for people online? It takes some training. It takes a lot of time and practice.
It seems like there's a lot of struggle around digital transformation.
Yeah. And, again, it's like not everybody's going to be tuned in a 4:05 for the newscast. Most people aren't going to be. But where most people might be later is the Internet.
Are there any tools or techniques that you would recommend?
I'm a big fan of CrowdTangle, which lets you see where certain story links are shared. If it's shared by the NPR main account or mothers in Crested Butte, you know. I've used it before as a reporter too, because I wanted to make sure my work in Dallas was being shared.
How much of this is an equity conversation?
It's one of my career goals to get my community, the people who look like me, the people I grew up with in Dallas, engaged. What can I do to increase their interest in my work and then my colleagues’ work? One of the effective methods that I found was that I played up who I was a lot. For example, like in Dallas, a little bit more than 40 percent of the population identifies as Hispanic. That's a huge contingent of people. They go to the hospital you go to. They go to the grocery stores you go to.
Some of the success I saw was in speaking up about my experiences as a brown kid who grew up in Dallas. The key there is representation. It’s shared experiences with your audience, or at least the audience that you're trying to reach.
My hope is that we can build a connection first. I think a lot of newsrooms don't have it at all. And you have to start doing it.
Do you have any advice for anybody interested in pursuing this audience journalism discipline?
No idea's dumb. That's my advice. if you have an idea, just say it or write it down because I would be shocked if, at newsrooms across the country where they have audience teams, they don't all say the most ridiculous things in Slack or private messages. I bet you that we all have ridiculous threads, scattered throughout for the past few months, about how to package a story. There are no dumb ideas.
If somebody is interested in getting into this work, audience journalism in particular, this has the most energy behind it. You've got a lot of people who have thought about. It's a great space for young journalists to really cut their teeth in a new kind of thinking in journalism. that brings real experience. I'm hoping that there's more space for this kind of journalism. 🟢
La próxima ⌛
The next OIGO is in your inbox April 29. The forthcoming edition we talk about diverse audio trends with Edison Research’s Gabriel Soto. He’s the guy behind the firm’s Latino and Black podcast listenership studies. If you’re wondering how important demographic change is, or need help talking to staff about it, read what Gabriel has to say.
After mid-May’s OIGO, the newsletter will go on a summer schedule of monthly editions instead of biweekly. I respect that many people have plans over the warm months. I’ll still give you much to ponder.
-- Ernesto
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Thanks again for reading.