When Orlando Ruiz’s brother brought COVID-19 home from his janitorial job in May, self-isolation was out of the question. He lives in a house in East Oakland with his parents, brothers, and their families. Within days, four family members were sick with the virus, three of them hospitalized, including Ruiz’s father, who spent two weeks at Highland Hospital before returning home.

It’s a story that has repeated itself throughout Latino and Mayan immigrant households of East Oakland, which has seen some of the highest rates of the virus in the Bay Area. As a reporting lab serving these communities, El…

In mid-summer, El Tímpano received a gut-punch of a message from an audience member. In a text in Spanish, she told us, essentially, “you always write the same — call such and such number. But they don’t pick up… Pure lies.”

In her typed words was the exasperation El Tímpano has heard all year from so many community members — that the information we’re providing just isn’t cutting it. No one is picking up the phone when they call to schedule a COVID test. The legal aid clinic’s voicemail is full. The state’s unemployment office denied a claim with no…

No puede uno trabajar. Lo están descansando y los biles y renta no esperan, pero si es por el bien de uno pues ni modo.

You can’t work. They are furloughing people and the bills and rent are due, but if it’s for your own good, what can you do?

It was the second week of March when Alameda County, along with six other Bay Area counties, announced a shelter-in-place order, suddenly bringing normal life to a halt. Businesses closed. Kids stayed home from school. Phrases like “social distancing” entered the vernacular.

While I had a host of questions about…

By Madeleine Bair & Sophie Lan Hou

Since El Tímpano’s founding in 2018, we’ve relied on the expertise of our audience to shape our work. Our editorial decisions and distribution strategies have been directly informed by listening, closely, to the Latinx immigrants of Oakland on everything from what they want a local news outlet to look like to what their greatest information needs are. Our team itself has grown as community members have learned about the initiative and asked to become a bigger part of it.

But we knew we needed to move beyond listening to community members. …

This blog was originally published on the Reynolds Journalism Institute website.

The fact that East Oakland is a media desert, particularly for immigrant residents, is clear. In the past two decades, the Latino immigrant community has grown faster than any other in the city. At the same time, options for Spanish-language news have diminished. For many of the Bay Area’s Latino immigrants, the daily half-hour news broadcasts from Univision and Telemundo, covering the entire 9-county region, are the extent of “local” news.

Figuring out how to fill that gap, though, is far from clear. …

Author’s note: Originally published on the Reynolds Journalism Institute website.

Where do you get news and information that’s relevant to you?

That’s what El Tímpano asked hundreds of Latino immigrants in Oakland, California, during an information needs assessment we conducted throughout the past year. We also asked community organizers, educators and church leaders how they share information with the residents, parents and congregants they work with.

Before piloting a reporting outlet to serve Oakland’s Spanish-speaking immigrants, we wanted to hear from them first, rather than making any assumptions about what would be the best format to report about, with, and for this community. …

In a church hall on an autumn weeknight, 14 residents and a half dozen public officials sit in folding chairs arranged in a circle. The meeting starts with a prayer, before launching into the issue at hand: the consistent build-up of trash on residential streets. One by one, in Spanish and English, residents describe the large piles of detritus they have passed when walking their children to school; the Saturday mornings they have spent cleaning their block, only to see it turn into a dump within a week. Oakland’s Director of Public Works explains what his department is doing about…

This is the second in a series documenting our efforts to map the information needs of Oakland’s Latino immigrants. Click here for the first post on the climate of fear, misinformation and mistrust in media that we found in initial conversations with community leaders.

At first glance, Oakland may be seen as a city with a thriving Spanish-language media scene. There are as many as four bilingual newspapers distributed in certain parts of town. Turn the radio dial and you will hear Spanish on several AM and FM stations, and there is nightly news on both Univisión and Telemundo. …