VOICES Publishing from the AAJA National Convention
The Heartland Project, a program initially designed to increase news coverage in minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) communities in Nebraska, has also become a gateway of opportunities for reporters.
The project launched last summer when the Asian American Journalists Association was awarded a $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.
Fast-forward to the beginning of this year, AAJA found its lead reporter to carry the torch of the program. Bobby Caina Calvan, a former national political writer for the Boston Globe, was hired in February.
According to the latest U.S. Census report, Nebraska’s population is 89.7 percent white. But minorities are expected to surpass the white population in a couple of decades. Research conducted by AAJA and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) found “little to no coverage” on LGBT and minority communities in Nebraska.
The Heartland stories aim to go beyond the numbers by adding a face, making it more intimate.
The one-year program kicked off in April with a story on teenagers in Lincoln during prom season. A Lincoln Journal Star editor pitched the idea to Calvan as a way to highlight the area’s growing diversity. The story generated excitement in the state capital, especially among teenagers.
“They saw in the newspaper people who look just like them, whom they could connect with, and that’s a value to the community but also to our business,” Calvan said.
Calvan wrote the article with assistance from student reporters from the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska. The students contributed to the profiles on attendees of the Lincoln High School prom.
“It’s always rewarding for veterans like me to see young people out there who have the tenacity, the talent, the drive and the interest in a profession that I love,” Calvan said.
Four months and several stories later, Calvan’s work has included pieces on a Burmese refugee, a teen from Mexico City, a foreign exchange student from Sweden, a student dealing with her sexual orientation, an African American girl overcoming adversities to graduate high school, blacks in baseball, and racism in two Nebraska towns.
According to Calvan, the goals of the Heartland Project are to establish partnerships among news outlets in the state, encourage newsrooms to put resources into coverage of diversity issues and hire freelancers to help with this effort.
Some of those partnerships include local newspaper such as the Lincoln Journal Star, statewide NPR station NET Nebraska and national website NBCnews.com.
It’s not only Nebraskans who have seen a difference in coverage; journalists who have taken part have noticed a change.
The Heartland project has given Calvan the opportunity to expand his reporting skills from a print-based medium to broadcast. He said he initially started out wanting to pursue his career “on-air” but instead stuck to ink. Now he is ready to grow as a multimedia journalist. Calvan plans to continue producing stories across all platforms.
The Heartland Project is not only heartening but it also aims to pave opportunities, allowing student reporters a venue to explore their interest in diversity coverage; enabling professional reporters to broaden their multimedia skills; and encouraging newsrooms to recognize an issue they have focused on.
“I’m hoping this project will help newsrooms in Nebraska realize the value of diversity and inclusiveness in the way they do their jobs,” Calvan said. “Also that they will realize that they cannot and should not ignore these growing communities of color/ LGBT because they do so at their peril if they don’t expand their audience.”
Calvan’s colleague Luis Peon-Casanova, a professor at the University of Nebraska, says he thinks the project is too premature to determine its impact on the community but hopes it will catch on.
“Just doing the coverage hopefully we’re really getting into people’s mind in the newsrooms that they need to do this type of work,” Peon-Casanova said.
