Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language news outlet, serves agricultural workers who live in or visit North Carolina each season. Its newsletter, El Jornalero, offers crucial, seasonal information on worker rights, wage changes, climate updates and other relevant resources. In addition to El Jornalero, Enlace Latino NC operates nine WhatsApp community channels, each dedicated to different themes and topics. To directly engage with the community, Enlace Latino NC also hosts community listening sessions across the state.
Paola Jaramillo, co-founder and executive director of Enlace Latino NC, talked with INN through a translator in November about how they know their WhatsApp channel and newsletter are reaching immigrants in North Carolina. This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
INN: What led you to start in Enlace Latino NC, and what is its mission?
Paola Jaramillo: It was right after the election of President Trump, the first round, when we started to see situations in North Carolina against immigrants and Latino communities, particularly those who are undocumented. There was a lot of disinformation and also a gap of information in particular areas. This situation led us to say, “Okay, people need information about what’s happening at the [General Assembly] because most of the information produced is in English.” The only team that produces constant information in Spanish is us.
It was time for people to have more information about the electoral process and, of course, to offer this type of educational information regarding everything that had to do with the immigration process. A lot of people were asking. So we said, “Okay, we need a media that starts filling these gaps, informational gaps that our community is suffering from.”
INN: Who is your primary audience, and how has that changed since you started?
Jaramillo: Our primary audiences are the different communities of Latino immigrants, first and second generation, in North Carolina. These are undocumented communities as well as farm workers who come with a temporary visa. But about three to four months ago, we started a plug-in on our website to translate information into English, and we have seen that it has attracted a different audience. We don’t know exactly if it is people who only read in English or if they are bilingual Latinos who prefer to read in English.
INN: What led you to start your newsletter El Jornalero?
Jaramillo: We started El Jornalero one year after the pandemic in 2021. During the pandemic, we did a lot of podcasts in Spanish for farm workers. We thought, perhaps not everybody wants to listen; let’s put some more information in writing.
Our newsletter offers resources, health services and legal services specifically to farm workers and community organizations that provide services to them. We also have a large WhatsApp community, and we started to see farm workers ask questions in these communities. We would then use these topics in the newsletter. And it’s seasonal; it goes from March to November.
INN: What kind of feedback have you gotten from people on the WhatsApp channels and the newsletter?
Jaramillo: Farm workers don’t tend to speak a lot, for many reasons. The main one is they are scared of saying something that affects their contract to return, so they are very reluctant to ask questions. But what we have seen is, even though they come once a year, they are very interested in learning what new laws there are regarding pesticides, more about their own health and care, workers’ rights, the exchange rate. And weather — hurricanes, big storms. The WhatsApp explodes. They start asking, “What’s going to happen with me? If my boss tells me to stay, do I have to stay? Should I go? Where should I call?”
These are the types of things that we hear the most about. So it’s not so much feedback like, “Thank you. This was very helpful. This was great.” Because they don’t tend to do that. But they do ask the questions, and that’s how we know.
INN: You’ve done some community listening sessions. What did those look like and how did they work?
Jaramillo: This year we did three rural listening sessions. They were very interesting sessions where, despite reaching the Latino community, we saw great differences depending on where these communities were located. In some places, people wanted to understand very specific things about the city where they live, like ordinances. They told us they were exhausted hearing about political matters. And in another session, they were very interested in education. In another area, we spoke about access to health services in a place where a lot of rural hospitals have shut down.
We are publishing information in Spanish, and the whole news system is created for English media. So we sometimes feel like cars are going one way, and we’re going the other way.
Paolo Jaramillo, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Enlace Latino NC
INN: What has been the biggest challenge for you since you started, and what have you learned over the years?
Jaramillo: We are publishing information in Spanish, and the whole news system is created for English media. So we sometimes feel like cars are going one way, and we’re going the other way. In searches, in many things, that is a big challenge.
How do you strengthen your audience in rural areas, when you were born as a digital news media? It’s different from when people have seen a printed product at the store and they recognize you.
Another great challenge is finances — how to keep going, how to sustain ourselves. Mainly, our income comes from foundations. But getting local or state grants from North Carolina foundations is a challenge because few foundations support journalism.
It has been a journey where we have learned to reach the national level. But at a national level, there are other challenges because they support research journalism, national journalism, accountability journalism and journalism in English, which is not what we do. We do not have the interest at the moment to offer Enlace Latino Atlanta, Georgia or Texas. No. Our interest is to remain, to strengthen, in North Carolina, to increase the audience in North Carolina, and to serve the communities in North Carolina.
INN: It seems like you have found a system that really works for connecting with people. But do you look back and, especially in the audience engagement process, see things you wish you had done differently?
Jaramillo: I am a journalist. In the beginning, you focus a lot on the services that you’re offering, but you forget how to sustain everyone. How is everybody going to get a paycheck at the end? So that part, I think, I would have managed it differently from the beginning. I should have had someone who had helped me in the financial aspects of different areas.
I would have loved to have done more community talks, community conversations, at the beginning. We did them, but I would have liked to have done more to understand much more what people were looking for, what they needed — the information people needed the most and consumed the most. And from the beginning, I would have worked more to build collaborations.
But it is a process where we learn, where we grow. And something that I have learned is to test things out. See what happens. If it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, okay, you learned. Maybe the lesson is don’t do it again. Go and do something else.
Audiences are alive. This is live media. This is not static, so it changes all the time, and you have to be learning from audiences and listening to them all the time.
INN: What advice would you give a news outlet trying to reach a community that has been underserved, either because of language or geography?
Jaramillo: The first thing you need to ask yourself: Why do you want to reach them? Is there a commitment to reach them, or do you have a $10,000 grant and you want to see how it goes? If you have a commitment, go for it. If not, I say don’t do it because this is about credibility. And definitely listen to them, meet with them, ask them, talk to them. This is vital.
You have to represent and understand the community you’re serving. Journalism is a public service, but I think we forgot. We started to believe, I don’t know why, that we publish the sacred word. This changed. If you don’t listen to communities, if you don’t talk to them, if you don’t provide a space, if they don’t see themselves represented, you have nothing.
INN: And what’s next? Are there any projects that you’re really excited about in 2025?
Jaramillo: We’re definitely going to expand our coverage for the west region. Our community is starting a long recovery process from Hurricane Helene, and our Latino communities urgently need information to recover.
We’re going to focus on education, immigration, and topics and issues with the new administration. And we’re going to focus on reporting more about three issues that we have seen in the last year: health, economic development and housing.
