El Tímpano

El Tímpano—Spanish for “eardrum”—informs, engages, and amplifies the voices of Latino and Mayan immigrants of Oakland and the wider Bay Area. Through innovative approaches to local journalism and civic engagement, El Tímpano surfaces community members’ stories and questions on local and national issues, provides news and information relevant to their needs, and investigates the concerns they bring to our attention. Since our founding in 2018, we have built relationships with thousands of immigrant residents and dozens of community leaders to establish trust and design journalism in collaboration with the communities we serve. Text messaging (SMS) is El Tímpano’s core approach to participatory local journalism. Subscribers receive timely, actionable, and relevant news and information, and are invited to respond with their questions, concerns, or stories on the issue at hand. This two-way relationship with our audience powers our in-depth journalism. Since the start of the pandemic, we have reported on the eviction crisis among immigrant tenants, the digital divide facing immigrant families during remote schooling, and the impact of COVID-19 on Latino and Mayan immigrants. We’ve also partnered with local and national media outlets to reach much larger audiences. In the next five years, El Tímpano will expand our reporting capacity to become not only the region’s leading source of coverage of the Bay Area’s Latino immigrant communities, but the nation’s first newsroom that counts thousands of immigrants as key collaborators in our reporting. We will grow our editorial staff, with beats that reflect the stories El Tímpano’s audience has already shared with us: Health, Labor, Immigrant Justice, Housing, and Youth. While our journalism will be published on El Tímpano’s own publication channels, media partnerships with outlets such as The Oaklandside, KQED, CalMatters, The 19th, and Univision will remain central to our distribution and impact strategy. At the same time, El Tímpano will continue to expand our SMS audience to serve 10,000 immigrants throughout the Bay Area.