News

Aug 07, 2023

El Tímpano, the Oakland news outlet for Spanish speakers that’s serving an isolated Bay Area

On a Tuesday evening last month at 7:02 p.m., I got a text message. “Hola, soy

On a Tuesday evening last month at 7:02 p.m., I got a text message. "Hola, soy Vanessa de El Tímpano," the short report began.

It went on to explain, entirely in Spanish, how Gov. Gavin Newsom had recently signed Assembly Bill 1766. The new law is expected to allow undocumented Californians without driver's licenses to apply for a restricted identification card from the state starting in 2027.

"Share with us," the bulletin requested. "How would you use the new California ID card? What type of ID do you use now and what barriers have you faced with the ID you have."

This is a typical text message broadcast from the nonprofit news outlet El Tímpano. Text messages like this arrive on my phone about once a week. Its reports are concise and congenial — they always begin with a hello and an introduction from who's texting and often end by asking a question to the recipients.

If journalism is sometimes used to provide a platform for people to sound off, El Tímpano (Spanish for "the eardrum") is intent on hearing back from its subscribers.

A screenshot shows an example of El Tímpano's text message journalism.

Based in Oakland, El Tímpano creates text message journalism that's predicated on a two-way channel with its readership: primarily Latino and Mayan immigrants in the Bay Area. El Tímpano's original reporting is often co-produced alongside other local outlets such as the Oaklandside and KQED, as well as radio programs like Latino USA and The World.

When founding director Madeleine Bair hatched the idea five years ago, she said, she was looking to eliminate assumptions about what journalism looks like. To begin, she facilitated discussions and workshops to hear directly from Mayan and Latino immigrants.

"It was clear from the get-go that we would not use a website," she said. "So many people told us they did not have a home computer or use the internet. Some said, ‘I think I have an email address but forgot the passcode.’ This was going to be a text-message-first news organization."

In a survey El Tímpano conducted, a respondent wrote that he wished the news "did not only speak of the negative."

Since sending out its first text messages in the spring of 2019, El Tímpano says it is now reaching 10% of Oakland's Spanish-speaking households.

"From our surveys, we can say confidently we are the No. 1 trusted publication for Oakland Spanish speakers," Bair said. "We have subscribers from as far as Tracy, Antioch, Richmond and San Jose. That tells us there is a real hunger for what we’re doing."

A vast majority of subscribers are in east Oakland, and Bair said the outlet is expanding into south Alameda County and Contra Costa County.

The growth has attracted funding, particularly from health-related foundations such as the California Health Care Foundation and the California Wellness Foundation, which recognize that El Tímpano has a direct line to a portion of the population that is sometimes overlooked.

Government health agencies and nonprofit service providers partner with El Tímpano to relay important health information to its audience. The outlet also receives funding from a variety of foundations and individual donors. Until the end of 2022, El Tímpano is participating in NewsMatch, a fundraising campaign for nonprofit journalism.

El Tímpano gathers feedback from Bay Area Latino and Mayan immigrants during an outreach meeting.

As it tells its subscribers upfront, El Tímpano never shares personal information with any of these partners unless it has received explicit permission.

To access the free news service, you text "HOLA" to 510-800-8305. Subscribers begin by answering a short survey. The four questions gain basic information — phone number, ZIP code, birth year and if there are children in the household — that helps El Tímpano tailor its coverage to each subscriber's specific location.

"All of the journalism that we produce is responsive to our audience. One of the things we heard from community members is the need for more local information," Bair said. "One of the critiques of the primarily Spanish-language broadcasters in the Bay Area is that they’re covering nine counties in a half-hour."

In some ways, targeting information to specific regions in the Bay Area is a continuation of a bygone model used in traditional print journalism.

"You can think of this in a way similar to your old school newspaper that had an East Bay edition and a Contra Costa edition," Bair said. "You’d find information only relevant to those subscribers."

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Bair has been involved with journalism since she was a child growing up in Oakland. She was involved with the youth media outlet Children's Express and had bylines in the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner throughout her teenage years.

During the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, Bair was one of 50 teenagers covering the event for Children's Express. Her dispatch was printed in the Examiner and foreshadows a proclivity to reshaping media.

"The irony is that ‘regular media’ is just what we are not," she wrote from the perspective of youth media. "We get the story from a child's point of view. I’ve learned that I don't want to be looked upon as just another reporter - or just another kid."

El Tímpano's founding director Madeleine Bair sought to eliminate assumptions about what journalism looks like when she started the Oakland news outlet.

Years later when she was launching El Tímpano and surveying Bay Area immigrants, Bair sat down with editors and reporters from outlets like the East Bay Express and KQED to hear of their challenges in covering immigrant communities.

"People for the most part did acknowledge that their outlets do a crappy job serving and covering immigrant communities," she said. "At that point, El Tímpano was more of a vision than anything else, but now that we’ve grown, we’re collaborating with a number of local news outlets. We see our work as an ecosystem."

Elsewhere in the Bay Area, other news outlets have focused on reaching an audience isolated by the language barrier. In the early stages of the pandemic, radio station KBBF 89.1 translated its English-language coronavirus-related broadcasts into Spanish, Mixteco, Triqui and Chatino.

El Tímpano's founding director Madeleine Bair, left, interviews Adrian Ahuatzi on Bancroft Avenue in Oakland in April 2018.

The collaborative media landscape that Bair mentioned hit an intriguing note last year when El Tímpano was in a position to report on the failings of a public agency that is also its benefactor.

Bair said the outlet was tipped off by its subscribers that the contact tracing program at the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency was collapsing. In January 2021, El Tímpano collaborated with the Oaklandside to produce the report "More Oaklanders left sick and in the dark as COVID surges and county says it can't keep up."

The investigation includes a disclaimer: "El Tímpano, which is led by one of the authors of this report, receives funding from the Alameda County Health Services Agency to provide public health information to its audience."

Bair said there was no hesitation in shining a light on the agency.

"There are certainly those ethical issues we keep in consideration and be as transparent as we can be," she said. "To maintain that trust is the most valuable thing that we have."

Over the holidays several ppl wrote to us asking where they could get tested for COVID. Many wrote again to ask how they could contact Alameda County now that they’d tested +. Which was strange, b/c the county was supposed to contact them, not the other way around. ⬇

As El Tímpano grows its subscribers, it's also growing its newsroom. It now has a website and added three staff members in September, including its first managing editor, who will build, lead and manage the growing newsroom.

On Nov. 1, a text came in that began, in Spanish, "Hello everyone! I’m Magaly Muñoz, the new reporter for El Tímpano," and ended with the question "What is going on in your community that we should know about or what you would like us to investigate?"

Although the outlet is growing at a slow speed — often one by one as residents meet the team or when a subscriber shares a screenshot of the texts with family and friends — El Tímpano's journalism is proving to have an impact.

"People told us they got vaccinated because of the information that El Tímpano provided," Bair said.

"There are a million Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Bay Area, and right now, there isn't a great local source of quality journalism serving those communities. Our ambition is to be that source."