This week, Epicenter’s newly launched podcast turned the mics on an unlikely subject: Ourselves.
You can listen or watch here, and we hope you’ll tune in again to this new series we call “Making It Here.”
As a local news outfit, we’re trying to offer more transparency into how we work, who we serve, how we make our money and what we need to keep going. We’re a small and scrappy newsroom. We were born organically to help share news and info during the pandemic, and that has kept us constantly in touch with community needs, market opportunities and changing technology. Some people call us a BIPOC publication or immigrant-serving, but considering New York City is two-thirds nonwhite, we think it’s only right to serve and center the majority of the city. And our staff looks that way; “We live here too,” we often say. In this conversation with Team Epicenter, we share an abbreviated version of our unique playbook on local news and community engagement. Some takeaways:
“Engagement” is worth defining
We are in a major moment of transition from the internet as it was. Social platforms such as Facebook are devaluing links to news media, video consumption is exploding thanks to TikTok, Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, and Google search results are less extensive and more curated via generative AI. What audience distribution and community engagement look like really depends on how they are defined — ranging from what’s posted on social media and how comments are addressed, to managing threads of comments on your website.
That’s not all it is for us, though.
In fact, much of Epicenter journalism does not appear on our website or even across social media. It is offered in the form of information that is creatively and strategically delivered with useful flyers, accessible through QR codes, and spread via word of mouth. It’s even gamified with bingo – as Carolina Valencia and Daniel Laplaza shared in this part of the podcast (check out the 19-minute mark, explaining how nontraditional methods of information delivery build and retain trust, and help communities recall key facts.).
Our communities are in need
First and foremost, we see a crisis out there. We were born out of Covid five years ago, and we take to heart an Elmhurst Hospital ER doctor’s recent proclamation that there are actually three pandemics: the first is people battling Covid, the second is people wrestling with addiction and the last is people struggling with their mental health.
And so while a lot of institutions want to move on from Covid, our commitment remains steadfast because food pantry lines still wrap around the block, vaccine misinformation persists, the mental health of New Yorkers is fragile and a lack of affordable housing is creating despair. And yet the social safety net is being defunded and dismantled, systematically.
There’s a direct line from these conditions to the affordability crisis that is taking center stage in the mayoral election.
Who gets to be a journalist?
Four years ago, a woman named Adriana Proaño responded to a post on the Jackson Heights families listserv seeking Spanish translators for Covid outreach. At the time, Epicenter was helping vaccinate thousands of New Yorkers, registering them for appointments, connecting them to resources with support from our volunteers and answering other queries.
Adriana was an accountant in her native Ecuador, moved to New York City for Act 2 and opened a furniture store on Northern Boulevard, which she sold in 2018. She responded to our ad and asked if we could accommodate so she could still pick up her kids from school. Over the next few months, Adriana did so much more than translate –– she became a model of how news and information can be spread, one to one. She gained trust in every community we were in –– from Corona and East Elmhurst to Queens Village and East New York –– by partnering with trusted messengers and institutions like schools, churches and libraries. As she explains on the podcast, if she helped someone at a library one day, the next day she’d return to find dozens of people seeking her out.
Last week, Adriana said goodbye to New York City and Team Epicenter, and will bring her talent and heart with her to the communities of South and North Carolina. We, of course, wanted to codify her approach, and express our eternal gratitude for her ability to help us redefine the delivery of journalism, and most importantly, the idea of just who gets to be a journalist. She’s taught me so much about how to do this better. And side note: Journalists who launch media companies should think about including former small business owners in the mix; Adriana’s skills and understanding have been invaluable.
News deserts are vaccine deserts are transit deserts are healthcare deserts are food deserts
Our industry often calls a place underserved by journalists a “news desert.” When we were working in Queens Village, an undervaccinated area in Southeast Queens, healthcare officials called the neighborhood a vaccine desert. Our community engagement team shared that, unlike western Queens, it was challenging to find public places such as grocery stores or laundromats or coffeeshops where we could provide information, the so-called “third place.” That’s when I realized that news deserts do not exist in a vacuum but more likely share the traits of communities that feel left behind on multiple fronts. Sure enough, as we’ve worked across the borough to bridge health inequities, neighbors often lament the loss of three hospitals in Queens more than a decade ago. It turns out a news desert is often a healthcare desert … and a transit desert … and a food desert too. The lack of access to services and quality information is connected.
A recent report from Rebuild Local News about the crisis in local journalism underscores what we are seeing on the ground. In 2002, the U.S. had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents. Today, the national average is 8.2 LJEs — a drop of about 75%. In Queens, one of the largest counties in the country — a borough that tops the size of cities like Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston and San Diego — that number is half, or 4.3. As the founder of Rebuild recently characterized Queens for me while we texted about these results: It turns out our borough, the city’s geographically biggest and the world’s most ethnically diverse urban area, has “half the already crappy national average” number of journalists.
We link this crisis to something we think Epicenter has been particularly good at: widening the tent of who gets to be a journalist. Besides examples like Adriana, we have continued our summer internship program, especially encouraging journalists of color, CUNY grads and students, and career transitioners to apply. We turn to a fleet of volunteers and part-time contractors to help us meet New Yorkers with news and information in formats and languages to optimize understanding.
We really need your help
Even as we think we’ve unlocked a very necessary way of committing journalism, the funding is drying up. After four years of receiving federal funds that supported our dissemination of health information, we received word earlier this year that they are not being renewed.
As you’ll hear us discuss on the podcast, we don’t want to repeat the harm that made our work necessary to begin with. And as trusted messengers in communities know all too well, we might be on the ground for, say, a health campaign, but are just as likely to be asked about housing or school admissions, changes to the bus schedule or where to go for early voting.
The question of how to keep showing up for communities when the funding has run out is a very real one for nonprofits, social enterprises and local news outlets right now. We vow to keep on, but we need your help to do it.
We, like so many institutions under attack right now, are reimagining who we are and how to keep the work going. I confess spending much of the last five years resistant to reader revenue as a strategy — because of the nature of who we serve and how we serve them, and the desire to keep our journalism accessible to all. I realize now that while subscriptions can’t be our only path to sustainability, it also can’t be off the table. So I’ll end with this: support our work, and be part of a model that centers impact over clicks, and service over scale.
How we succeed collectively is inherently tied to how we address information gaps — one neighbor, one community, one city at a time. We can’t do it alone. Whether as a funder, advertiser or partner, your support helps us inform, connect and empower — and build a future where local media serves a public that goes from surviving to thriving. Let’s win together: donate here. And please be in touch: [email protected].
The post How Epicenter redefines news deserts, community engagement and who gets to be a journalist appeared first on Epicenter NYC.