Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Conecta Arizona's audience retreated from its WhatsApp group into one-to-one messages
Documented, El Timpano and Conecta Arizona reach immigrants over WhatsApp, WeChat, TikTok and SMS. Conecta Arizona's founder says members now avoid the group chat and write to staff privately, one reader at a time.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Documented and Conecta Arizona launched the Immigrant News Coalition last year with the Listening Post Collective, El Timpano and Sahan Journal to share strategies and keep their outlets alive.
- Documented runs a Spanish WhatsApp group, a WeChat group for Chinese immigrants and a Haitian Creole TikTok account to counter misinformation about ICE raids and fear-based scams.
- Members of Conecta Arizona's La Hora del Cafecito are engaging less in its public group chat and more in one-on-one direct messages with staff as ICE raids continue.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost When readers move from a group chat into private messages, the unit of work changes from one post to one conversation, and a newsroom of a few people absorbs the difference.
- constraint The award pays for testing revenue models, so growth in these channels shows up first as a staffing need and only later, if at all, as income the outlets can bank.
- decision Any newsroom copying the approach has to decide whether hours spent answering inbound messages count as reporting time on the budget, because that is where the sourcing now happens.
- contradiction The access the Guardian documents came from prior coverage and a relationship, so reach through WhatsApp and trust with a source are two separate claims about these outlets.
A public group chat with thousands of members costs a newsroom one post. A direct message costs a reply, and then the one after it. Maritza Felix, who started Conecta Arizona's La Hora del Cafecito on WhatsApp during the pandemic, said members are engaging less in the public chat and more in one-on-one messages with staff as ICE raids continue [14][15]. "They're afraid of being a screenshot, or having their message forwarded to someone," Felix said [16].
That change is an operating cost before it is anything else. The weekly Q&A with immigration attorneys, education policy experts and labor rights specialists reaches the whole group at once [14]. Felix said: "Listening to our community taught us that what works today might not work next week. We are listening to what they say and their silences at the same time." [17]
This runs on grant money. Its stated job is to find a business. The Press Forward Foundation awarded $1.5m to "test and spread effective revenue models for immigrant-serving newsrooms", with additional funding from Democracy Fund [8]. Five organisations are named in the Immigrant News Coalition: Documented, Conecta Arizona, the Listening Post Collective, the Bay Area's El Timpano and the Minneapolis-based Sahan Journal [7]. Divided evenly, that is $300,000 each [20], and the Guardian does not say how the award was allocated [21].
On reach, the case for these channels is strong. Over half of Latinos in the US use WhatsApp [10], and the coalition's listening tours and research found that immigrant audiences do not always arrive by website or push notification, especially when English is not their first language [9]. Documented runs a Spanish WhatsApp group, a WeChat group for Chinese immigrants and a Haitian Creole TikTok account against misinformation about ICE raids and fear-based scams [11]. El Timpano reaches its Bay Area community by SMS among other channels [23]. Madeleine Bair, who founded it, said: "We're not translating news into other languages. We're creating news first and foremost for immigrant communities, and that looks very different than news created for non-immigrant communities." [13]
The access story is narrower than the channel story. When Allan Marrero, an asylum-seeker from the Cayman Islands, was released after five months in immigration detention, the one journalist he invited to his celebration was Documented's Eileen Grench, who had reported on him after he was detained following an interview with federal officials for a marriage-based green card [1][2]. That came out of published work and a relationship. Grench said of such subjects: "Most folks in these situations aren't just victims; they're fighting and being resilient and maintain the beautiful things about their life, too." [3] New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted her story when Marrero was released [4].
The grant's own wording says the revenue models are still being tested [8]. Angie Chuang, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said: "The impacts are phenomenal for relatively new media outlets, and part of it is because they're operating on such a hyper-local level." [18] Hyper-local reach is earned city by city, so what Sahan Journal has in Minneapolis cannot be lent to El Timpano in the Bay Area [7]. For a newsroom deciding where to put a reporter next quarter, the question is whether inbound messages count as reporting time. Conecta Arizona has answered it. Its staff are in the messages [15].
What to watch
- Whether the Press Forward revenue-model tests produce earned income these newsrooms can report, or another grant cycle.
- Whether Conecta Arizona staffs up for direct messages or caps them, and what that does to the weekly Q&A.
- Whether a legacy newsroom hires reporters into these channels, or licenses the coalition's stories instead.