Civic Media Pioneer Builds Trusted Information Source for Immigrants

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The Bay Area’s vibrant communities of Latino/x and indigenous Mayan immigrants have been underserved by and underrepresented in mainstream media coverage for many years — a situation that contributes to immigrants’ hesitancy to trust institutions that could provide lifesaving help to them. 

In 2018, Oakland native Madeleine Bair founded an innovative participatory journalism model in which members of these immigrant communities — whose numbers include Spanish-speaking Latinos/x as well as those belonging to the city’s growing population of indigenous, Mam-speaking Mayan immigrants from Guatemala — help to shape the content it produces. 

Pulling its name from the Spanish word for “eardrum,” El Tímpano responds directly to information gaps identified by readers, many of which relate to health and health care. Using innovative methods — a text-messaging service that sends information directly to subscribers, for example, and a misinformation defense program that educates community members to identify and combat false narratives — Bair’s team has helped El Tímpano readers understand vaccine safety, Medi-Cal eligibility, and more. While El Tímpano is not the first and certainly not the only media outlet that serves the Latino/x and indigenous populations in California or even the Bay Area, important insights about trust and misinformation can be learned from Bair’s innovative approach.

Bair built her career by bridging the worlds of journalism and participatory media. She cut her teeth in news as a youth reporter in Oakland. She later completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley, ran a program helping media activists and eyewitnesses around the world document human rights abuses, and led an initiative dedicated to advancing the use of citizen video as a tool for human rights. 

She believes that developing a reliable and thriving information ecosystem for and with the Bay Area’s Spanish-speaking immigrants requires that trust be established between journalists and community members. “Trust is at the foundation of our work,” Bair told me in a recent interview. The following transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.  

Q: How is El Tímpano different from other journalism models?  

A: Broadly speaking, our objective is to foster a more informed and engaged community by crafting verified, impactful journalism. Our newsroom does in-depth reporting based on and powered by what we hear from our community, and we publish that on our website. We partner with other media outlets and trusted institutions like schools and churches. It’s all very participatory. We work to meet people where they are. 

Q: Why did you want to reach this community in particular?  

A: As someone who grew up in a very diverse city, I’ve always been frustrated that news media outlets don’t portray the diversity of the communities they purport to cover. As an eight-year-old in a local youth media program, I was taught to analyze the media and ask questions like: Who do media serve? Who is harmed by the media? Whose perspectives are portrayed and whose are left out in news coverage? I’ve carried those questions with me throughout my career.  

When I moved back to Oakland in 2017 after many years away, I learned that Latino/x immigrants were the fastest-growing group in the city. But you would have no idea that was true by consuming local media. You simply didn’t see their voices, stories, or concerns reflected in local narratives and civic conversations.  

I am neither Latina/x nor an immigrant, but I married into a Latino/x immigrant family. That experience has given me a much closer view of the inequities that exist within and are perpetuated by local media. While I — a White, college-educated, digitally savvy English speaker — have so many sources of information at my fingertips, my in-laws’ experience is completely different. Through them, I’ve witnessed the consequences of having limited access to news and information. El Tímpano seeks to address this gap, so those who don’t necessarily speak English or have access to email or a smartphone can still get the news they need to make informed decisions.  

Q: Describe the process of launching this media organization.  

A: El Tímpano was established through building relationships of trust with the communities that we wanted to serve. Most news outlets start with a newsroom with reporters and editors and then create content and build an audience. We flipped that model on its head. 

Before launching, we spent nearly a year just listening to Oakland’s Latino/x and Mayan immigrant community leaders and community members to learn what they wanted to see in local Spanish-language media. In those conversations, we heard many critiques of the existing Spanish-language media landscape: that it was sensational, that it only covered attacks on their community, and that it didn’t give people enough information they could use. When we asked people what they wanted from local media, the most common answer was “más información” (PDF) — more information.  

Before hiring reporters, we hired community outreach workers to introduce El Tímpano to community members, have conversations with them, and respond to their questions. We developed content strategies and distribution mechanisms, but to this day, the number one way that community members learn about and subscribe to El Tímpano is by meeting someone from our team. We’ve taken time to invest in and maintain the community’s trust, and I think that’s why we have such an engaged and loyal audience.  

Q: How does El Tímpano distribute information to that audience?  

A: Our primary vehicle is a text-messaging platform through which we provide Spanish-language news and information. We adopted this approach because so many of our community members don’t have a home computer or home internet, but pretty much everyone has a phone.  

Critically, subscribers can respond to those text messages. They can write back just to say “thank you,” or they can respond with a question or to share their story. Whenever someone writes to us, they get a response, so they know that there’s someone listening on the other end. That ongoing two-way communication has really helped us develop a relationship of trust with our audience.  

Q: How do you guide community members to reliable health information? 

A: We developed this platform at the onset of the pandemic, when people had a lot of questions. In these underinsured communities, people didn’t necessarily have a doctor they could call. That lack of relationship with a health institution is one reason immigrant communities are reluctant to trust public health officials.  

During the rollout of COVID vaccines, El Tímpano answered more than 1,500 questions from text subscribers, which gave us insight into the reasons behind vaccine hesitancy. Their reluctance mostly stemmed from people having nowhere to go for answers to very personal health questions, like whether vaccines were safe for cancer survivors, or if a child with asthma would be eligible. Many people told us that our information helped them to make the decision to get a vaccine.  

People are very conscious that they don’t have all the health information they need. El Tímpano works to fill that gap by being an ongoing source of verified information, as well as a platform that people can go to if they have questions and can’t get answers elsewhere. 

Q: With all this in mind, how does your newsroom operate?  

A: We produce two different types of journalism: conventional in-depth reporting, which is what is on our website; and service journalism, which is news you can use and is in response to the needs expressed by community members. It helps readers access resources to make informed decisions for their families and communities. It’s produced for our Spanish- and Mam-speaking audiences through text messages and through a Mam-language video series that we distribute on Facebook.  

Health has always been the number one topic of interest for our community. For two years now, we’ve been covering the expansion of Medi-Cal to immigrants regardless of legal status. We let people know what policies have changed, who is eligible, and what phone number to call to register or learn more.  

We also just published a long story about the ongoing chilling effect that Trump’s 2019 “public charge” policy has had on immigrant communities. Although this policy was reversed by Biden, the community has remained hesitant to access certain government benefits that they are entitled to and that impact their health. Hopefully, by being that source of information, we can help combat those fears.  

Q: Can you tell me more about the types of misinformation that target El Tímpano’s community?  

A: Immigrant communities have long been the targets of disinformation and scams that take advantage of their vulnerabilities and of the structural challenges they face — from financial precarity, to housing insecurity, to inequitable health access. People receive letters in the mail with false ATM cards, or individuals seeking housing are asked to pay a security deposit in cash, which then disappears. A lot of these scams proliferate on social media.  

There are many deeper reasons people might fall victim to health-related scams or misinformation, one of which is being underinsured. They often have fewer options for care and must wait longer to see a provider, which means they may turn to other, less reliable sources of health care or information. Recently, a community member told us she had to wait so long to get a doctor’s appointment that she just gave up and used home remedies. For similar reasons, others have told us they have turned to supplements advertised online.

Q: How does El Tímpano help subscribers fight back? 

A: One of our most important innovations is our misinformation defense training program, through which we have trained more than 100 Spanish-speaking immigrants and community leaders across the Bay Area to identify misinformation, so they can halt its spread. The program takes inspiration from the promotora model of community health education — a practice with deep roots in Latino/x cultures, where community members serve as trusted messengers of health information. We started the program at the height of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.  

As a small organization, we lack the capacity to debunk or verify every piece of misinformation. Instead of taking a fact-checking approach, we train community members to be more informed, more judicious consumers of information. The program focuses on the tactics of spreading and identifying misinformation, because those techniques are the same whether the topic is health, politics, or finance. While great resources have been developed around how to verify online information, most have been developed for professional journalists, not average consumers — not to mention non-English speakers. We also created a series of text messages that share key takeaways with our thousands of text-messaging subscribers. Recipients of those texts are asked to send us examples of potential misinformation they’ve come across, so we can look into it. In that way, we are fostering a healthy skepticism among community members.  

The response has been great. It’s something people are hungry for. Community members tell us that with so much misinformation swirling around, it’s impossible to know what to believe. That uncertainty is a core objective of targeted disinformation, so by providing this program, we are helping to mitigate that. 

Q: After the 2024 election, you reconfirmed El Tímpano’s commitment to being a trusted source of information for immigrant communities. Will the platform approach the second Trump administration any differently?  

A: El Tímpano started during the first Trump administration. In the participatory design process, many immigrants told us they were avoiding news because it focused on attacks on their community or because it caused them to panic. A lot of us can relate to that feeling, but avoiding the news also can leave people fearful and vulnerable to misinformation.  

We are providing people with information that gives them agency and doesn’t leave them feeling powerless. Trump has already said his administration will be targeting immigrant communities for massive deportations. Our core values will remain unchanged: We want to support people to have the knowledge and confidence they need to make informed decisions during the next Trump administration.

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