Episode 4: Elevating the Voices of Underrepresented Groups
Follow the story of Conecta Arizona and Capital B, two start-ups that were founded to fill critical gaps in local news coverage for Spanish-speaking and Black communities.
In March 2020, the United States agreed with Canada and Mexico to restrict non-essential border crossings in an attempt to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Maritza L. Félix was on the U.S. side of the southern border in Arizona, but her family was on the Mexican side. They began using WhatsApp to stay in touch and share information about the virus.
But when her mom sent her a message with advice to “just drink some hot water with baking soda and lemon, and you’re going to be fine,” Félix, believing that her mother was falling victim to dangerous misinformation, set up a WhatsApp group to factcheck COVID information. That group ultimately became Conecta Arizona, which Félix says grew from serving 12 people to now “100,000 people in different platforms and products.”
Félix says the group filled a void, that there was a lack of culturally competent, Spanish-language news for a community that wanted and needed it. As Félix put it simply, “Our community has been underserved.”
The pandemic and a sense of a community not being well-served also contributed to the founding of the local and national news organization Capital B.
Against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests, a presidential election and COVID, Lauren Williams, who in 2020 was senior vice president and editor-in-chief at Vox, said that she and friend Akoto Ofori-Atta, then the managing editor at The Trace, started thinking about Black journalists and their treatment in newsrooms and the implications for the Black community of a shrinking “legacy Black press.”
“Our Community Has Been Underserved”
As she put it, “We were really worried about how local audiences were going to be served as local news was dying.” In Williams’ view, there wasn’t enough news being produced for and about Black people, and “that is how Capital B came to be.”
As we reimagine what local news is and can be, outlets like Conecta Arizona and Capital B are models of a new, more expansive, more inclusive wave of local journalism.
People often pine for the news days of yesteryear, a so-called “Golden Age” of newspapers when the money poured in, and a faltering business model was unimaginable. As media scholar Robert G. Picard wrote in 2003, “Print media became one of the most profitable businesses in the developed world during the second half of the twentieth century, and they enjoyed returns far in excess of other industries.”
But the mainstream media then was also more homogenous and insular, having less diversity in its reporting corps and less focus on the full range of issues diverse communities wanted and needed.
“We were really worried about how local audiences were going to be served as local news was dying.”
In 1968, The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, issued a report that offered a damning assessment of newsroom diversity: “The journalistic profession has been shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes.”
The report pointed out that tokenism was not a sufficient response, and scarcity of applicants was not a sufficient excuse: “It must become a commitment to seek out young Negro men and women, inspire them to become — and then train them as — journalists.”
In 1978 the American Society of News Editors set a goal of having newsroom diversity reach parity with the population by 2000. The industry failed to reach the goal, so it moved the goalpost, aiming for parity by 2025. It is still nowhere near to achieving the goal.
A 2022 Pew Research Center Report, based on a survey of almost 12,000 journalists, found that “76 percent of all reporting journalists surveyed indicated that they are White, while 8 percent are Hispanic, 6 percent are Black and 3 percent are Asian.” As the report makes clear, “these figures align closely with previous research showing that a large portion of newsrooms’ employees are White, higher than the share of U.S. workers overall who are White.”
New, nonprofit organizations like Conecta Arizona and Capital B can help to increase and expand the number and quality of diverse voices in the industry, but these kinds of new ventures can struggle to attain sustainability, and funders hesitate to give to them.
A report published by the Democracy Fund in 2018 found that “from 2009 through 2015, $1.2 billion was invested in journalism, news, and information in the United States, including 8,954 grants from 1,555 funders to 1,253 recipients” but only 6 percent of those were coded as going toward efforts that serve specific racial and ethnic groups.
As the authors of that report, researchers Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark, wrote at the time, “Efforts in journalism to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the past decade have been ineffective in creating dynamic change in the stories, sources, and staff of news outlets in the United States.”
As Félix explains, although she was awarded a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, and she used those funds and money from her freelance work to keep Conecta Arizona afloat, the operation wasn’t sustainable for three and a half years, not until more funders like Democracy Fund and the Walton Foundation came to the group’s aid with grants.
Capital B’s funding also comes largely from philanthropic revenue, along with corporate underwriting of its journalism.
The hurdle is connecting the interested funders with the journalists and their operations and overcoming some entrenched barriers — sometimes born of racial stereotyping and cultural profiling — to funding.
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“There is this kind of embedded belief that folks of color aren’t good stewards of money,” says Alicia Bell, director of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, when explaining why some newer organizations led by minorities weren’t being financed directly by foundations at the same level as other news organizations.
The Racial Equity in Journalism Fund is working to change that. It is an intermediary fund providing resources to BIPOC-led and -serving journalism organizations, and as Bell puts it, its job is “pairing capital with capacity.” The fund works not only to make these organizations sustainable, which some foundations use as a criterion for funding, but also to de-racialize the idea of what sustainability means in diverse communities.
“The Amsterdam News has been around for a hundred years,” Bell said, “and yet in 2019 was not being named a sustainable organization.”
If funders and communities can expand the idea of who is deserving of assistance, news organizations founded by and for people of color can increase and improve coverage of a quickly diversifying society and provide a more stable bridge to the future of news and the future of the country.
An essay by Charles M. Blow
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