Bringing people along
Daniela Allee of New Hampshire Public Radio on journalism, WhatsApp and equity
When ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire? was announced in 2020, it was met with much interest from public media. Here’s public radio jumping into Spanish-language content not through translations posted online, podcasts, etc., but on WhatsApp. Quite bold when you consider public media’s most daring moves tend to be websites and TikTok accounts. With the energy of New Hampshire Public Radio and collaborators behind it, Qué Hay’s success seemed like a possibility.
Some months before this interview, I talked with leader Daniela Allee – a visit she mentions below. I was struck by her genuine love for the community she lives in, and a desire to serve a need that has gone unmet. I was inspired by her work ethic in serving the Hispanic community in New England, which to the casual observer seems invisible. And I was gratified to see NHPR was wise enough to pass someone the ball and let her soar with it, or at least to step out of the way and not block the lane.
This OIGO discussion is one of my favorites, because Daniela speaks to issues all of us, myself included, have struggled with. At a time when there is rightful criticism of our medium and past mistakes, it takes something meaningful inside us to say we can win in spite of fill-in-the-blank (resistance, resources, our own fears, apathy, et al.) and also win over hearts and minds in the process. She talks about ways we can be changemakers in public media. She has more clarity about these topics than some people I’ve met with decades of experience. Daniela Allee may be the one to get you excited about public media’s future.
In addition to leading NHPR's Spanish language news initiative, ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire?, Daniela is the station's Western N.H. reporter. She comes to NHPR after earning a degree from the Missouri School of Journalism and stints with FLiP Colombia (Fundación Para La Libertad de La Prensa), Here & Now and Planet Money. Daniela is an avid runner, amateur baker and loves bringing people together over good food. 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼
How did come to doing this work that you're doing today?
I moved to New Hampshire in 2017, after getting married (my husband was in his third year of grad school at Dartmouth). I had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, and I knew I wanted to be in radio. But there's one public radio station in New Hampshire. So, I was like, ”Okay, somehow I have to find my way to NHPR.’ I applied for a fellowship that they have for early career journalists, and started in May of 2018. Then the following year, there was a job opening, to be the regional reporter where I lived. So, I started as a full-time reporter in July of 2019.
Once the pandemic hit in March 2020, our CEO sent an email to me and two other colleagues about what kind of Spanish language resources there were about the health situation, and what might be ways of producing a useful resource. Jimmy Gutierrez and I reached out to people we knew in the community about what was available in Spanish about New Hampshire (very little) and what might be easiest for people to access. One idea was to translate our COVID blog into Spanish. But Jimmy and I had heard from people that folks weren’t going to read a translated blog about covid.
I knew Radio Ambulante had a WhatsApp group; my family's on WhatsApp, I use WhatsApp, people I've talked to in New Hampshire who are part of this community use WhatsApp. What if we just put it on there? Then you can send multimedia, audio, text. It's more accessible that way. Another colleague suggested translating our local newscast into Spanish and sending that out as an mp3.
And when we floated the idea of getting a Spanish newscast out on WhatsApp, folks we talked with said, “Yeah, we think that could work. Lots of folks use WhatsApp.”
Now, we're talking April, 2020, where we're trying to develop this idea. I'm sure folks remember the pace of what the newsroom was at that point in the pandemic. Two years later, we've grown from team of me and a part-time producer to another full-time reporter. I'm officially editing and managing it. I took on more responsibilities as time went on and as the station needed someone to keep this going. It wasn't an intentional, this-is-what-I'm-going-to-do-with-my-career move.
Looking back now, in college, I’d participated in an activity where you finished out a sentence that said, “My voice matters in journalism because…” I had written that Spanish speaking communities have stories to tell too. And then I wrote the same thing in Spanish. And looking back at that six years, that feels really prescient.
What was the conversation to win over leadership to something WhatsApp, because most people would perceive producing something means it’s going to be on the radio?
That's a great question. I tried to underscore that Spanish speakers did not have a relationship with NHPR, and expecting Spanish speakers to tune into our station or go to our website was unrealistic, versus finding a way to deliver news on a platform many people use in their daily lives.
I think part of it was both my experience with WhatsApp and also hearing from and being able to say ‘hey, we talked to people who are a part of the community we’re trying to reach.’ We weren't doing a huge survey of a hundred people. But I can show you some general statistics of how widely used WhatsApp is used within the Latino community. This feedback was taken at face value. (Our CEO also spent some time talking to folks from Documented and Daniel Alarcon about WhatsApp to learn more).
Now we're coming up against some of the limitations of WhatsApp in terms of being able to know how many people are reading every message. But in the beginning, the big question was how can we just get information to people?
Were there any other obstacles or resistance that you had to overcome?
I don't think there was resistance to the idea and principle of providing news in Spanish on a platform that was neither our website nor the radio. I hadn't really thought about how weird that might be for a station to say, ‘we're going to do WhatsApp.’
In some ways, that was the main obstacle. At a time when so much changed, when there was so much news to cover, we were bringing in a new platform that not a lot of people at the station or our partners at the Granite State News Collaborative were familiar with. There was teaching that I had to do to bring folks along with a platform I was familiar with but they less so. That had some challenging moments.
To partner most effectively in a new project, everyone needs to take some initiative on their own to know how a different platform works.
I think people were just pleased because at one point, a few weeks before launching this, I basically just took ownership of the project, even though I wasn't officially designated project leader. “I'm just going to take the lead, make sure we’re all on the same page and figure out ways to move forward,” is what I told myself. Because we did need someone to do that! I think people were relieved that somebody else took on that mantle. And it's been that way since, now reflected in my job title.
For me, I haven't faced a lot of resistance to serve this audience. And I think you've pointed this out in previous newsletters too, right? All of public media is asking how do we diversify the audience? How do we get other people to listen to us? How do we get audiences to care? At NHPR, they see this (Que Hay) as fitting into these broader strategic goals for the station.
How did you handle that pressure? Because it's one thing to launch a project. It's quite another to be implicitly told we need somebody to lead this project. We don't understand the platform. We're not necessarily learning platform. And we don't have any relationship to this audience. So, in a lot of respects, whether it's stated or not, its success or failure falls on your shoulders to a degree.
I mean, that's what I felt. That was ever explicitly said to me, but that's definitely the pressure I felt.
The narrative that I told myself for a long time too was I better know all of this. I better be coming up with strategy and goals. How do we do this? How do we grow? How, in all of these things that I have no experience in (project managing, building audience relationships, etc.), do we succeed? That was hard, and I think it's gotten better. But, really early on, I was truly building this plane while flying it. That was scary.
Another pressure that some of your readers will relate to is now you have this project and now you're purporting to serve an audience that has been traditionally ignored by public media or only looked to in certain times. And then you have this thing that to you there's so much potential to, that you don't want to fail. You don't want it to be something that becomes, ‘oh sorry, we tried this project but now we’re pulling out’ that might just a repeating of the cycle, you know? And you're having that sense of obligation in I'm straddling these two worlds and understanding how important it is.
Something I want to underscore too is that ever since we started the project, we’ve had a group of community leaders and other members of the Granite State News Collaborative, which is a consortium of 17 news organizations. About 13 people, community and media members, make up the Latino/Spanish Language Community Media Partnership. Our shared purpose is to increase news availability in Spanish by producing content that the Latino community in New Hampshire needs, while building connection and understanding between Latinos and the broader community. The people I know in this community want to really see Que Hay succeed, and they understand how important it is. This project has always had their support, and I don’t think we’d be where we are today without it.
One big lesson from the launch that I’ve carried with me comes from my mom. It had been a tough day as we were getting ready to first launch, and I called her. I was still super green on getting something started, delegating things and figuring out how to lead. She told me ‘You know, you sometimes just have to hold people's hands and just accept that that's how it's going to be. You might have to be the one bringing people along. And when you can accept that, there can be a lot of bitterness that might be let go, or a sense of resentment that you can just end.’ For me, that was a huge mental reset in the process.
To hear that wisdom from my mom of sometimes you do just have to hold people's hands through new things, and be gentle with them and try to give them the benefit of the doubt in your heart. Your blood pressure will be way more thankful for you for having done that than just stewing in what isn’t working optimally.
You're in New Hampshire, however you're bordered by what feels like a dozen states! What does an audience in Vermont or Maine need versus what an audience New Hampshire might need?
Vermont, for example, has a pretty large population of migrant farm workers. I think those needs for folks who might be here seasonally are different than what people in New Hampshire want.
The demographic makeup of the Latino community is also unique. I think there is an interesting opportunity to think about this more regionally. New England, especially northern New England, is not huge. What are ways that we can be thinking about serving Spanish speakers regionally?
Something that we've heard from our listeners is wanting to find a sense of community and knowing what community events are here. Where could we meet other people? New Hampshire doesn't have a main Latino community center, so the communities here feel pretty dispersed. It might be pretty similar for other people in northern New England – wondering where is everyone and how can I just be around people who look me, who understand me, and where I don’t have to explain myself and my culture.
Is there any particular reporting or conversation that this work has sparked that you're most proud of?
I have three stories. Two of them are by Gaby Lozada, our reporter from Report for America covering Latino/Latinx issues in the southern part of New Hampshire.
She went to a legislative hearing on a bill about driver's licenses a few months ago. There were two women there who were testifying in favor of the bill, in Spanish, and someone was interpreting for them, which is to me, an unheard of thing in the New Hampshire state house. They were there as part of a leadership class that one woman is running so that Latinos and new immigrants can get involved in their community. This is obvious: people care about their communities, no matter what language they speak. Here’s a group exploring those issues and solutions in their own language. I just don't think that that's necessarily always part of the narrative in New Hampshire media about immigrant communities. It’s generally, ‘well this is what they need,’ or ‘here's this other program to serve them.’ The narrative is implicitly ‘immigrants just take and don't give anything back.’ We’ve heard this concern from a few folks in our Latino/Spanish Language Community Media Partnership.
Something else that we learned from that story is people really want to volunteer, but two of the bigger barriers are transportation and language. People may want to find ways to help, but how do they get there? And how can they find out about those opportunities? So that’s something we’re asking people who we interview and talk with.
The other project that Gaby has done is an on-going series of three- or four-minute videos of members of the Latino community sharing, ala StoryCorps, a moment in their lives. It’s called Visibles.
Gaby would go to these events that were pro-immigrant and she expected to see more Latino people. And she was like, ‘I don't see anybody. Where is are all the Latinos? Who's here? Where are we?’ I think that's one of the goals of that video series is sharing important moments in folks’ lives. The interviews are in Spanish. We have them subtitled in English, but we don't reframe the story for an English-speaking audience.
The third series that I'm proud of that actually came out of this partnership group that I was telling you about. Some of the group’s media members had gotten a grant and, as a group, we discussed how we might use that money and what project ideas people had. We ended up pursuing a series that highlighted Latino restaurant owners across the state, and how they were faring during summer 2021. We worked with another outlet to highlight five or six restaurants. It was just fun. People really enjoyed that series.
Is there any work that you've done that your mom is most proud of?
I know for a variety of reasons that not everyone whose family and parents speak Spanish grows up bilingual. I think it would make her proud that I can use Spanish in my work. They were very insistent about speaking Spanish at home and that this is an important part of who we are and that you can always put that to use and it'll always be valuable in your job.
I'd have to ask, but I think she'd probably be proud of this project as a whole. She knows how important it is to just have information available in your first language or the language that you feel most comfortable in. I think that's what Que Hay’s goal is: for people to have information that's useful to them. And then they can either better understand their community, access a resource or just enjoy a good story.
Founding something is hard, and to found something that has such an impact and, full circle, relates back to your own growing up has got to feel really good.
It does. We celebrated Que Hay’s second birthday on April 28, which is something I would love to go back and tell 2020 Daniela, who was deeply feeling that this project’s success rested on her shoulders.
We're still growing. We're still learning. We're still trying to do different things and really be community-oriented and not just extracting people's stories for the sake of telling stories. Keeping relationships at the core of what we do is so important, and central to this work. Two years of groundwork, and now we have more of the confidence to be, ‘okay, let's really try even newer things, different things – let's go bigger.’
Honestly, talking to you a few months ago and hearing you say that this project’s success depends on the station as a whole was a big shift for me. I think I knew that at one level, but in the last few months, I’ve made more efforts to talk with different departments, wrote up a one-pager to share internally. That was a big shift for me. The sustainability of this does not depend on me alone, but I need to put it into motion those connections across departments. How other people can help make this sustainable, beyond my time at NHPR? How do other department share that burden of not letting this fail? It can’t be on one person. It's on us as an organization. That was huge for me, and it’s really set the tone for this year. You might need to help bring people along and help them see what their role is. But how can we work most effectively and collaboratively, to ensure that we're doing things well?
Any words of advice for those interested in doing work as unique as Que Hay?
If folks are going to start something or are thinking about a project that serves a community that you've not really built a relationship with, take the time to build the relationship before you build the product.
I understand we’re feeling this compressed timeline of urgency and immediacy, but let's maybe start community engagement efforts, in one neighborhood, in one city, and start small. Trust is a process that takes a long time to build. And maybe it isn't at the speed that a story gets written or that you interview five people, and you’ve got a story out the door the next week. Good things take time.
I wish we had had more time to meet with people and involve people who weren't already the community leaders. That's definitely a place to start, but I just wish we had found ways to take more time with people who Gaby has talked with, and for us to really be listening to them, and building relationships with them before having put something out into the world.
If I look back and if we hadn't had a pandemic and all of that, we had had nine months to really think that through, really take a slow process, we would have been better for it. Not to say that we don’t have a good thing going. My encouragement is to take the time to do that.
I don't know how to sell people who might be resistant to that idea, but we can't stick with what the normal models are with how we engage with people. And we have to try something new. If the worst thing that happens is you don't end up developing a whole new product or a whole new way of getting information out to people, but you built relationships with people who are also part of your audience and the community you serve...that is inherently valuable.
When it comes to building those relationships: take time to really hear what people have to say about your news organization, and the broader local news ecosystem. Maybe there have been stories in the past that people think wasn’t accurate or only captured one part of what was going on. The question we get as journalists then is why should we trust you? Why should we talk to you?
If you come in just wanting a relationship so that you can build a product or only get people to spread the word about that product, people see through that.
Being reflective before initiating that relationship process or that conversation process is super important to just interrogate and provide yourself the same skepticism that we journalists love to pride ourselves on. Take the time to be skeptical about yourself. See why you're doing what you're wanting to do, and then what the impact of that will be or what you would want it to be. Allow that to be shaped and re-shaped by the people you’re purporting to either work with or reach. 🟢
La próxima ⌛
The next OIGO is in your inbox June 3. Next edition, Anayansi Diaz-Cortes joins us to talk about the work behind After Ayotzinapa, a series covering the 2014 human rights tragedy in Mexico.
Last month, Adonde Media released the last episode of the Spanish-language version of the After Ayotzinapa. They produced six episodes that are different from the English-language version in that we hear directly from all the people involved in this story. A very important conversation on several matters.
-- Ernesto
Cafecito: stories to discuss ☕
NPR and LAist Studios are launching Oye: The Lab for Latinx Creators. Oye will be a talent accelerator, and it looks promising. Here is where you can learn more and apply. The deadline is May 25.
Elena Coll suggests three Latin American concepts should be incorporated into journalism. “The terms shared here come from a strictly activist sphere, yet they can help us better understand both personal and collective stories: why people come together and how they carry the fight,” she writes.
Darker skinned Hispanics report facing prejudice from other Hispanics nearly twice as much than do those with lighter skin. That’s according to a Pew Research report out last week. (Thanks to Carla Murphy for this.)
El radar: try this 📡
Connect with Hispanics around science reporting. Nieman Lab wrote about journalists’ efforts to engage Latinas/os/es/xs in their medical and science news. We focus so much on elections when we discuss misinformation that I fear we may not be addressing everyday health queries.
Ask about the community and covid-related PTSD. Speaking of health, JAMA printed a new study that showed Latina/o/e/x families are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder tied to the coronavirus at higher rates than other demographics. What is happening locally? Are your area hospitals or service providers seeing this issue?
Put your videos in the mix (or take them out). Last OIGO, Gabriel Soto discussed the importance of YouTube to Black and Hispanic media consumers. Now, YouTube has introduced a new feature to its TikTok competitor, where public YouTube videos may be used by creators on the service. If you or your organization wants to include your public videos to be remixed, it is time to talk about it. On the other hand, if you cringe at what your videos may become, this is a smart time to opt out. Here’s how.
Hispanic Buddhism? The Guardian investigated a growing community of Latinas/os/es/xs engaged in the Buddhist faith. Is this happening near you? Are Buddhists doing Spanish-language outreach where you are? And what is the appeal of Buddhism among local Latina/o/e/x followers?
Thanks for reading, and for sharing OIGO with others. Hagamos comunidad.