Teenage reporters cover LA
LOS ANGELES: To an outsider, a food cart in Boyle Heights might look like just another place to buy a churro or some corn on the cob. But for Jonathan ThunderbirdOlivares, street vendors are the centre of a conflict between a community and its poorest members, one that touches on issues of land use, immigration and economic policy. And the best place to read about that conflict is The Boyle Heights Beat.
The Beat (Pulso de Boyle Heights, in Spanish) is a bilingual newspaper written largely by teenagers from the Boyle Heights neighbourhood on the east side of Los Angeles. In the coming years, the residents of Boyle Heights may be in greater need than ever of a publication that tells their stories.
The paper was founded in 2011 by Michelle Levander, director of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, and Pedro Rojas, former executive editor of the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, as a means of teaching young people about reporting. With financial support from the California Endowment and from private nonprofit sources, the website and the free quarterly print edition with a circulation of 33,000 is the only publication focused exclusively on Boyle Heights.
The neighbourhood, with about 99,000 people in an area of 6.5 square miles, is famous for its murals of religious and historical scenes. It’s an old neighbourhood in transition, a working-class, predominantly Latino area facing gentrification as developers revamp historic buildings. Old and new meet in Mariachi Plaza, where kids skateboard and mariachi musicians wait to be hired for parties just a few steps from a slickly designed subway station and a large apartment complex under construction.
Though many families have been in Boyle Heights for generations, a significant percentage of residents are undocumented immigrants, and anxieties about Donald Trump’s presidency run high. In a recent issue of The Beat, Jacqueline Ramirez, a 19-year-old student at Santa Monica College, interviewed an immigration lawyer about the future of the Obama era-programme Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows undocumented young people brought to the US to stay temporarily and get work permits. Ramirez, who has written for The Beat since high school, said this issue was important to many of her friends.
An article on The Beat in The Columbia Journalism Review drew national attention to its deep local coverage. The Beat, like any traditional paper, aims to show readers how national issues — such as immigration, worries about marijuana dispensaries and barriers to mental health care — play out on their streets.
Big papers like The Los Angeles Times and La Opinion don’t have the resources to cover Boyle Heights fully, Rojas said. Its young reporters know what their neighbours care about and how to make a story relevant to them — to “give it a heart and soul,” said Yazmin Nuñez, a founding member of The Beat.