Are Latinos the way to digital transformation?
Samantha Guzman of Decibel shares how deep listening online awakened Latinx conversations
The emergence of the Internet, content streaming and social media have remade journalism worldwide. And digital transformation has been on public media’s radar for many years. The pace has slow, at times.
Many public media organizations have developed digital-first initiatives. KQED's Above the Noise, Arizona PBS and others are doing bold work. There are also many important engagement journalism endeavors. One of them is happening in Texas.
Samantha Guzman is the executive editor of Decibel, a community-led journalism project at Austin PBS. Decibel strives to amplify diverse voices in Central Texas through in-depth listening and storytelling. Previously, Sam reported on science and technology for Austin PBS. Before coming to Austin PBS, Sam worked at KERA, the NPR and PBS station in Dallas, where she helped produce the live radio program Think, and shot and edited multimedia stories.
In this OIGO, we talk about building trust with communities, as well as within public media. 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾
How you got to where you're at right now?
Where I first had that moment of like, ‘okay, this is the work that I want to be doing’ was in grad school. There was this project at the university that I went to, the University of North Texas, called Heart of Mexico. It would bring students from the United States and students from Mexico together to partner on a journalism project. We would go into these areas of Mexico and do stories about the everyday people that live there in an effort to push beyond stereotypical coverage you often see of Mexico.
We had teams of four – a videographer, photographer, a writer and a translator for the students that didn't speak Spanish. And we would work together for a month on a story. I started on that project as a student, and then I came back the next year as an assistant teaching instructor. When I started my professional career, I was a mentor. Every time I would go back, it reinvigorated me. It was so different from what I was doing at my day job. I was like, ‘wow, this is what journalism could be. This is the type of journalism that I want to do. Everyday stories of everyday people with these unifying themes that show that we're more alike than we are different. That's the work I want to be doing.’
Now, working with Decibel, I get to do just that.
What was the evolution of Decibel that people may not be as familiar with?
Decibel used to be a monthly show that aired on TV. When COVID happened, we switched to doing a weekly broadcast centered around COVID. We did that for a couple months and quickly got burned out. Then I was given the opportunity to lead the Decibel team. It was really scary if I'm being honest.
I decided to sit with the team and take a step back and say, ‘look, we know this COVID thing isn't working. We're a very small team. This is not playing to our strengths, but what do we want to do? We don't want to go back to that monthly broadcast because that really wasn't working for us either. What's the type of journalism that we want to put out into the world? How do we want to tell the stories of central Texas?’ Me and the team talked a lot. We had a lot of meetings. It was important to me that everyone felt like they were critical in developing Decibel’s next step. Community engagement was always at the center of what Decibel was trying to do, but I don’t know if it was truly baked into our mission like it is now.
I did a lot of research about community engagement and a lot of different models. And I found the Listening Post Collective, which is doing amazing work. I found their model and I was like, ‘this could be something that we could adapt.’ We’ve had some growing pains in figuring out how certain aspects of this model work for us, but we are finally hitting our stride in a lot of ways. Now the model is fully fleshed out. We pick a community. We stay there for a year. We host listening sessions. We go back and continue to get feedback from them and we produce content all along the way.
What was it like to change?
For our small team, it was transformative. If you asked some of the folks on the Decibel team, especially myself, we would say we are doing some of the best work of our careers. Centering the community in our work has made everything better.
As far as the station at large, we are still adapting to Decibel changing. What's interesting about public media is that we say that we want innovation, but what we really want is slight changes to our traditional way of doing things.
Most of my friends don’t have cable or watch television in the traditional sense. I know our current largest audience is on television, but it's a little short-sighted that we focus so much on the audience that we have right now and not the audience that we're trying to acquire. If we really want to thrive and survive, we must appeal to new audiences. We have to be able to adapt. I feel like people say yes, but then they don't realize what it takes to make that possible.
If you ask anyone whether or not they support Decibel, if they think it's a good idea, everyone will say yes. The last hurdle we are working on is understanding what it takes to actually transition and not just apply traditional thinking to this new thing.
How does this get reflected as we think about terrestrial versus digital?
Even internally, people will still ask, ‘when does that air?’ I mean it makes sense, right? We are a television station, so they think ‘when will this be on television.’
Social media is another good example. We try to create different versions of our stories depending on whether it’s on our website or posted on Instagram. Each medium requires a different strategy and those strategies have to be constantly evolving because things change so quickly. A lot of times, we want to put the same type of broadcast content on these platforms, but they need to be different. We need to think about these platforms as something different from television.
We have gone through so much change at Austin PBS over the last couple of years, not to mention all the challenges the pandemic has thrown our way. A lot of people know that things need to be transformed, but having the staff and resources to change is always a challenge. Putting together that plan of what widespread systemic change looks like is really tricky and involves many more people than just me. It's an important conversation we are having and a lot of other public media organizations should be having right now, too.
What have you been most proud of?
Public media specifically, although media at large, has had a diversity issue from inception. I always think that public media makes this issue more complicated than it needs to be. Something that goes hand in hand with Decibel is not just our stories, but our source diversity tracking.
We have a survey that we send out to everyone. I can show you the analytics of who we talk to. People of color are always the majority. Of course, this work is never done and we have to continue to expand on what source diversity looks like, but that's something that I'm really proud of. Also, I'm really proud of the content, and that we have numbers that support our mission and values.
I hope that it can be a model that newsrooms can learn from. A lot of organizations say they prioritize diversity, but ultimately producing content is the number one priority. They won’t hold a story if all of the sources are white, for example. If they free themselves from the idea that more content is king, the industry as a whole can reach goals of showcasing more diverse voices. Here, it's a priority and that's why we're successful.
What would you tell someone at a public media organization who wants to break some paths around this work, but doesn't really know how?
Community engagement is sort of trendy right now, but I worry about whether public media organizations are serious about centering their newsrooms around this work. I see many one-off projects around say reaching brown and Black audiences. But how are you transforming what you are already doing to make sure when these new audiences start listening or watching your station so they feel like it’s a place they are welcome? We can’t think these audiences will feel comfortable, because public media was never designed for them.
If community engagement, if reaching these new audiences, if these things are really important to you, then figure out what you're not going to do in order to make it possible. If this really is a priority, it takes time, it takes dedication, it takes more than just the staff producing content. It is not something that is going to be successful by just saying, ‘oh yeah, we do community engagement on top of all this other stuff that we do in our newsroom.’ Organizations have to be honest with themselves about what are the things that are not going to help them achieve this goal, and stop doing whatever that may be, and instead do the things that are going to help them build trust with the communities they cover.
How do you feel we can break through the monocultural approach that we sometimes see in media, around the Latino experience?
For me, the way that you fight against that monoculture is by doing lots of stories with nuance. The reason a lot of media fall into this trope is because, when you're only covering a community when certain things happen, that's going to lead to stereotypical coverage. People are more than just the place that they live or what happens to them. People feel all the same things that we feel. Most of our stories at Decibel can be boiled down to one theme. And the theme is usually not, ‘oh, they're Latino.’ The theme is being a fish out of water or having to transform or having to adapt to change. When you start looking at stories like that and you're already reporting in a primarily Latinx community, I think it breaks through that a little bit.
How important for you as a leader is building your internal and external networks and communication about this work?
When I stepped on to lead the team, I had a plan for reaching out to the three communities that impacted our work. It was one, the communities that we cover; it was also our internal Austin PBS community, the staff; and the community in public media. I thought all three of those communities needed different outreach methods because we needed the support of all three of these groups in order to make this work possible.
Something that I do every month is I create an internal newsletter. I send it out and I'm like, ‘here are the stories that we did. Here's what we're working on next month. You can click and you can see it all at our website,’ just so the staff knows what's going on. Maybe they're not checking out the website all the time. Sometimes you get stuck in your own world.
I also make sure lines of communication across departments outside of that newsletter are open because what happens a lot in public media is things get a little siloed. I have a standing meeting with other departments. It is important to bring people outside of content creation into the fold, so that they feel a part of it. I honestly believe our work isn’t possible without them. I’m not an expert in marketing, or putting on events, but I know how to tell a story. Bringing people together with different expertise allows all of our work to be better.
In the listening you've done with communities and the journalism that you've done at Decibel, what have you learned about your community and yourself?
I've learned a lot about just the diversity of what Austin is. And I'm really excited about our coverage, because it highlights that in a way you wouldn't find otherwise. We hear that from the listening sessions, too. The communities we choose have been underrepresented in the media. And we hear that from people. I feel proud, but also it breaks my heart every time when people thank us, because they're like, ‘thank you for listening to us. No one really has done that before.’ I'm grateful that they feel thankful, but also pissed off that we are the first ones to do it.
What I’ve learned about myself is to trust my gut more. I’m proud of what Decibel has become, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you there were times where I questioned myself. When you’re trying to push your station to diversify or try new things, you will face opposition and that can make you question whether or not you’re doing the right thing. It’s not always easy, but I do believe if you keep fighting, you might be able to do the work that you always dreamed of. You might be able to push this industry forward and highlight and showcase some voices that we should have been listening to for a long time. 🟢
La próxima ⌛
The next OIGO is in your inbox March 4. The forthcoming edition reviews public media's many initiatives aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion. How is it looking? What are the problems? Where are the limitations? DEI has been a major focus in public media. In some instances, our ability to recruit diverse talent and audiences is an outcome of DEI's progress. Let's unpack it all here. 🧳
(Full disclosure: I signed on to Headway Training’s letter awhile back and was formerly on Public Media for All's organizing committee. AMA. 😇)
— Ernesto
Cafecito: stories to discuss ☕
California lawmakers have introduced a bill to create a $50 million public fund for journalism. ✍ Grants would be issued to organizations to help support local news coverage. The inspiration? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Marco Rubio of Florida have asked the State Department to report on efforts to improve safety for journalists in Mexico. 🚨 Over 50 journalists have been killed since December, 2018. They blame Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for stoking some of the violence.
López Obrador sparked controversy Feb. 11 when he publicly came at Carlos Loret de Mola, revealing what the journalist allegedly earns. Releasing personal information of this nature violates Mexican law. It resulted in the #TodosSomosLoret Twitter Space that lasted 10 hours and drew over 1.5 million listeners.
NPR’s Franco Ordoñez spoke frankly to Hispanic Executive about the need for more Latino/a/e/x public media professionals. “There is an appetite for the Latino point of view, and there aren’t enough of us doing this work,” he said. “We need more Latinos at NPR and at the White House.” 🏛️
Spanish Broadcasting Systems has secured Cox Radio outlets in Tampa and Orlando. SBS is best known for its Mega and La Raza branded music stations. The deal creates Florida's top Hispanic media service. 🎙️
Felicidades a Kevin Del Orbe. He has been tapped for an International Center for Journalists grant. 📄 He will work with WJCT and WMFE to develop social media strategies.
El radar: try this 📡
Incentivize engagement with membership. 🤩 Something to learn from commercial media. The Knoxville News Sentinel launched its Digital Advisory Group to listen more to Black voices. The DAG included a Facebook group and one-year digital subscriptions. Learn how it went at Better News.
Ask about your state's farming. 🧑🌾 Climate change is killing farmworkers. High Country News covered the issue, where labor is mostly Hispanic, and forgotten. Soaring temperatures in the fields have meant more fatalities. What is happening in your state?
Explore your org’s history… but do it well. There's been some press for the Philadelphia Inquirer's review of its history. It's quite interesting. What's stunning, though, is the decision to leave out the name of the copy editor who wrote the paper's infamous "Buildings Matter, Too" headline. Said copy editor is even quoted. 😕 The incident shone a bright light on racism at the paper. It's a curious choice, and one that isn't made about others named in its story.
Solve the micropayment puzzle. 💵 We know Hispanics are on smartphones a lot. On this platform, micropayments have been seen as the way to go. Yet hurdles exist for this means of giving. Simon Owens explains. Can someone in public media address this one?
The last newsletter on Hispanic demographic trends received many positive comments and shares by the likes of Nieman Lab, the Maynard Institute and others. Gracias a su apoyo. Also, thanks for the story tips, interview recommendations and offers to collaborate. More to come.