Charles Ornstein of the non-profit news organization Pro Publica wrote last week under the headline, "How We Reached Workers While Reporting on Dairy Farm Conditions." Here's an excerpt:
Spanish-speaking dairy farm workers in Wisconsin, many of them undocumented immigrants, are not regular readers of our website. Most have never heard of ProPublica, let alone formed a trusting relationship with us. Some have low levels of literacy and poor internet connections because the farms they work on are remote. Connecting with them, both to conduct our reporting and to share our findings, is a challenge.
For months, Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel have been reporting on conditions at these farms. But one of their earliest missions was crucial. They needed to find out how the workers got their news and make sure ProPublica’s reporting reached them and their communities. The reporters’ process underscores one of our central beliefs at ProPublica: Publishing a story about injustice isn’t enough if we don’t reach the people who are directly affected.
Back in February, when we released the tragic story of a child’s death on a Wisconsin dairy farm, we knew we had to do more than translate it into Spanish.
Sanchez and Jameel are both fluent Spanish speakers; they are both the daughters of immigrants and grew up speaking the language. ... Early on in their reporting, they learned that dairy farm workers regularly use TikTok, sometimes making humorous videos of themselves dancing in dairy milking parlors. So the reporters, too, became active on the platform, chronicling their reporting trips to Wisconsin and documenting what they saw.
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The team also identified businesses in these rural communities that serve Spanish-speaking customers — the spots where immigrants wire money to their families, buy groceries or do their laundry. They visited more than 60 businesses across the state and hung up flyers seeking sources. At one business, a small store a few miles from where Jefferson [the boy] died, Sanchez and Jameel connected with community members and learned how the official version of the child’s death did not match the account the community knew to be true.
The story we published after months of reporting showed how the sheriff’s deputy who responded to the scene mistranslated a key phrase and blamed Jefferson’s father for running him over with a piece of farm equipment rather than understanding that another worker had been driving the machine. Their search for the truth prompted local and state officials to call for police to use more effective translation practices when responding to scenes at which people only spoke a language other than English.
The story appeared on our website and on the front pages of nearly a dozen Gannett-owned newspapers in Wisconsin. We translated the story into Spanish and developed relationships with several Spanish-language publishing partners in Wisconsin and Central America, where many of the immigrant workers are from. These outlets included Mi Wisconsin and El Faro. We also commissioned an audio version of the story in Spanish. Jefferson’s father, who has a first-grade education, said he listened to the audio version several times. Hearing our story, he told the reporters, helped him finally understand how his son died, and how law enforcement so completely failed to understand what happened.
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In Sparta, near the Mississippi River, the team spent about an hour at the Supermercado Guerrero. They watched a young Nicaraguan woman take a booklet and tuck it into her purse. They asked her if she’d heard of the story, and she said she had read it in Mi Wisconsin, one of the websites that republished the article.
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