Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Soon after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the team at El Tímpano began considering the implications for their work serving and covering Latino and Mayan immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In a political climate that often vilifies the communities El Tímpano serves, managing editor Heather Tirado Gilligan realized telling nuanced, human stories would be more important than ever. But the real threats of deportation hanging over undocumented immigrants raised the stakes of the newsroom’s work gathering and shining a spotlight on sensitive identifying information.
The team was “immediately aware of the implications in the newsroom, of not wanting to…lead people to the most vulnerable in our community,” Gilligan said. “We were trying to think, how do we balance these two things? How do we keep these people safe and tell their stories at the same time?”
Since November, Gilligan has led the newsroom’s work developing new reporting policies designed to balance those two imperatives. El Tímpano announced those policies last month, along with a public annotated bibliography summarizing key takeaways from the sources Gilligan consulted to inform the new guidelines.
Among those sources: Borderless Magazine, the Chicago-based nonprofit outlet “reimagining immigration journalism for a more just and equitable future.” Back in 2017, after Trump signed the travel ban in the early days of his first term, Borderless “realized that we needed a set of ethical standards to specifically address the unique dangers facing someone who is a refugee, asylum seeker or of undocumented status who chooses to share their story with journalists for publication.” They established best practices for reporting before, during, and after an interview, such as not specifying a person’s immigration status unless relevant to the story, and explaining the potential risks of speaking with a reporter.
“That [story] really resonated with me,” Gilligan told me, “because honestly, that’s our greatest fear.” That fear “motivated us to come up with these policies…[the fear] that in trying to help someone, we would inadvertently harm them.”
The idea behind the cards is, in part, to shift the power dynamic in sources’ favor, Gilligan said, to “make people feel kind of empowered in the relationship — like, you can ask us questions, too.”
Here, also, there’s a line to be walked; these conversations must be up-front about the risks of speaking to a reporter without gratuitously intensifying a climate of fear, Gilligan explained. Fear is already fueling disinformation in the communities El Tímpano covers, she noted.
“We don’t want to terrify people, or make them more afraid than they necessarily are,” she said. “But we more want to convey, what are best practices for you to keep yourself safe?”
That approach is consistent with El Tímpano’s stated mission to inform and empower its audience. (El Tímpano means “eardrum” in Spanish.) During the listening work that led to the outlet’s creation, the outlet heard that the news too often “created fear in [people] without allowing them any avenue for action,” Gilligan said.
Here’s how El Tímpano now approaches identifying sources who are not public figures:
Starting in January 2025, as a rule, El Tímpano will identify sources who are not public figures by first name and last initial, age and city of residence. If other potentially identifying information is needed for the story, we will change the identifiers so we never use more than three. For example, if we report a story about fast food workers that reveals a source’s job, we would either use a pseudonym for that source or not reveal their age or city of residence (see list of potential identifiers below).
That list of potential identifies includes country of origin, employment, school, social media account, and “identifying physical descriptions.” Previously, these were requests the newsroom might have accommodated on a case-by-case basis, like many newsrooms, Gilligan explained. “The biggest shift here is making that case to case our default,” she said.
The policy is also designed to protect sources by minimizing the information that could be subpoenaed, Gilligan explained. “There are certain types of information that we are not keeping if we don’t need it [and] not collecting if we don’t need it,” she said.
El Tímpano is refining an additional, separate data and records retention policy, to the same end of minimizing and protecting information on file that could harm sources. For now, keeping information as secure as possible means El Tímpano tries “to place the records in a place that has higher privacy protection.” Specifically, the team keeps records on a cloud service provided by the privacy-minded Proton.
The policy acknowledges some of these practices may seem out of step with how other outlets think about newsgathering:
We recognize that this approach seems unconventional in the context of the traditional idea that journalism’s credibility is rooted in gathering and sharing as much information as possible about the life experiences of the people we feature in our story. El Tímpano’s credibility and legitimacy, however, aren’t derived from journalistic standards that are extractive and potentially harmful. Our position as an authoritative source depends on our close connection to our community, which fuels our community-powered reporting. El Tímpano’s newsroom’s top priority is to maintain our community’s trust.
The team discussed the possibility such a policy change could, at worst, discourage other “more mainstream” newsrooms from partnering with and republishing El Tímpano’s work, potentially undercutting an important source of reach for the small local news nonprofit. (In the past year, the outlet has partnered with news organizations including KFF Health News, the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and California Health Report.)
“It’s a little early in the game to see whether or not this has happened,” she said. But Gilligan, and El Tímpano, came to the conclusion that this policy was necessary to preserve the news outlet’s greatest strength: the trust of the communities it serves, as “community-fueled journalism.”
“It’s our reputation for our closeness to our community that makes our journalism something that people are interested in and want to invest in,” Gilligan said. “We do reach this population that some people would describe as hard to reach. But we have a very close connection to them, and so that is the most important thing to us — to keep that going.”
In fact, in the early days of implementing these policies, Gilligan said the biggest challenge remains convincing people to talk at all. “Despite our unique position, people are still hesitant to talk,” she said. “People are very frightened.”
Beyond reported stories, El Tímpano will exercise caution in what it shares on its social media accounts about its own reporting activities. Specifically, it will avoid sharing “the physical location of reporting outreach on our social media accounts or other public-facing communication platforms.” Instead, the news outlet will double down on in-person outreach, “accompanying our outreach team to meet people where they are: at community events and forums, food distributions and swap meets.” It will also continue to communicate with subscribers via SMS about where and how to reach its journalists.
El Tímpano is going a step further than thinking about how to protect sources in the context of its reporting; it’s proactively sending text messages about how community members can protect their digital privacy. Here’s a text message El Tímpano sent Jan. 30 (in the original Spanish and translated to English, provided and translated by Gilligan):
Hola, soy Vanessa de El Tímpano. Hemos escuchado las preocupaciones de la comunidad sobre la seguridad bajo la nueva administración. Estos son algunos consejos para protegerse en internet:
– Evite publicar información personal, como su dirección o estatus migratorio, en redes sociales. Hable de temas personales en privado, en persona o por teléfono.
– Active la autenticación de dos factores para mayor seguridad en sus redes sociales. Un código es enviado a su teléfono para que pueda ingresar.
– Evite compartir información personal a través de mensajes de texto. Si desea hablar con El Tímpano de temas sensibles, coordinaremos una llamada.
Cuéntenos, ¿qué preguntas tiene?
Hi, this is Vanessa from El Tímpano. We have heard the community’s concerns about security under the new administration. Here are some tips to protect yourself on the internet:
– Avoid posting personal information, such as your address or immigration status, on social networks. Discuss personal matters in private, in person or over the phone.
– Activate two-factor authentication for greater security on your social networks. A code is sent to your phone so you can log in.
– Avoid sharing personal information via text message. If you want to talk to El Tímpano about sensitive issues, we will arrange a call.
Tell us, what questions do you have?
“I would encourage all other news organizations who are covering vulnerable communities to think through the best way to balance telling their stories with protecting their sources,” Gilligan said. “I think that’s a very important exercise for everyone, all journalists, to be doing right now.”
You can read El Tímpano’s new policies in full here.
