When Patricia Mercado decided to launch Conexión Migrante in 2016, she knew it would be a newsroom focused on providing information to the Mexican migrant community in the U.S. Watching the U.S. election campaign, Mercado anticipated that Mexican migrants in the U.S. would need their own news source to navigate immigration policy changes, and launched Conexion Migrante on Nov. 8, 2016 – the day President Trump was elected.
“We started Conexión Migrante with the notion that migrants had nostalgia about their roots, about what was happening in the places they left. Basically lots of information about Mexico, or whatever Trump said. We thought that was something they would value,” Mercado recalls.
But in spring 2017, they received a Facebook message from a Mexican migrant who wanted to know how to get a Mexican passport for his son, who was born in the U.S. The father was worried that immigration policy changes would force him to return to Mexico and he wanted to be prepared.
“We found the correct answer for him and said, ‘Maybe it’s a good idea to write a story about it.’ That became Conexión Migrante’s first story ever to reach 1,000 page views. Before that, only friends and parents visited the site,” Mercado says.
The success of that story revealed a new strategy to Mercado and her team – letting migrants’ questions set the editorial agenda. Today, those questions are the main source for story ideas and Conexión Migrante rarely publishes a story that doesn’t originate with a question from the community.
The core of Conexion Migrante’s work has little to do with nostalgia anymore, and more and more to do with the future of Mexican immigrants in the United States at this tumultuous moment.
This means that the questions they get and the traffic numbers on their articles are often an early indicator of problems that will become headlines in the U.S. weeks later. Long before American newsrooms began covering the impact of coronavirus on migrant farmworkers, Conexión Migrante was receiving calls from migrants working in agriculture who were concerned about protecting their health.
Realizing the real ‘job to be done’
When they got that Facebook message from a Mexican immigrant inquiring about a passport, Conexión Migrante had been publishing for about six months. Facebook messages and e-mails began pouring in. Mercado and her team focused more and more on turning their answers into written articles. Later that spring they received an audio message via Facebook from someone who didn’t know how to read or write, asking for a phone number to call.
Conexión Migrante realized that they needed a public phone number and quickly added it to the footer of their homepage. News of the direct line circulated fast.
That phone soon rang constantly, bursting with questions such as:
“How can I protect myself and my family from ICE?”
“How can I safely take my kid to school?”
“What should I do if I’m about to be deported?”
“By then, we understood that people were being referred to us by others, and every question was a lead for a story. We even ended up answering some of what we thought were less relevant questions as weekend content, like a story about how to get a job in Canada, which triggered an outpouring of calls from people who were asking us to get them a job in Canada,” Managing Editor Andrea Ornelas said.
Though they started out as a more traditional news organization, they “ended up answering the phone more than anything else,” Ornelas concluded.
This is how Conexión Migrante found its niche as rigorous service journalism designed with and for Latino immigrants in the U.S. By the end of 2019, they had answered more than 2,000 phone calls and replied to almost 10,000 Facebook messages. In early 2020, before the pandemic, they were receiving an average of 450 Facebook messages and 200 phone calls a month.
The Conexión Migrante team in the newsroom, which is in Mercado’s home. Credit: Ginnette Riquelme
New workflows and new skills
Putting the call center at the center of their work required overhauling their editorial workflow and hiring people who could listen as readers and callers told them what they needed to know.
This also required a different approach to sourcing. It was no longer about finding experts to quote, it was about building relationships with organizations serving immigrants who could help them reach more of those immigrants, and distribute the answers to their questions.
“The readers started to show us the nuances in the everyday needs of a migrant. So we ended up doing more specific stories like why you should carry certain documents all the time, how to react if you’re detained, etc. But it was also about getting real close with people who were already strong inside the community and who were also providing for them long before us, like lawyers,” Mercado said.
Ornelas said it took time to figure out how to convey this change to the journalists on their team.
“One of the main conversations [we had] was about the tone you use to speak to this audience. We quickly understood that in order to serve migrants, we had to not only listen to them, but also do it in a respectful way, being really mindful of the gaps that there might be in terms of education level, needs to address, and their current situation,” Ornelas said. “We learned how to be more tolerant and patient. When migrants call consulates or embassies, they get hung up on. We can’t do that. We need to treat every caller respectfully, because we are the last resort for many of them.”
“We knew right off the bat how didactic and simple our communication would have to be,” Mercado says.
Teaching callers where to find answers
In the beginning, they just answered questions via phone as they came up. They kept internal documents with information on frequently asked questions, but never thought about publishing them. They answered every question that came in, both written and verbal.
But they knew they couldn’t keep up with the demand for much longer.
So, Mercado and Ornelas expanded the call center, hiring two staffers to support it full-time. It still wasn’t enough to answer all the calls coming in. In 2018, they began collecting all of their “procedural” articles in one place and telling callers to check there first, and to call back if they still couldn’t solve their problem.
A screenshot of one of Conexión Migrante’s procedural articles about what options a migrant has if their lawyer doesn’t fulfill their obligations to their migrant client
“That also added an extra step: teaching some of these folks how to click on a Facebook story that we produced. In a way, we moved on to digital education,” Mercado said.
Now, Conexión Migrante has more established hours of service and an answering machine that discloses their hours and where to get answers quickly at the website. They also have a protocol for journalists about how to deal with the people who call.
This document covers issues like tone, how to direct callers to resources the project already has and how to connect with groups and agencies that might help them on a specific issue. The new workflow also includes a document with all the questions that have been answered so the journalist can direct the person calling to a resource that Conexión already has on its website.
Blending journalism and customer service
Conexión Migrante’s service spread by word-of-mouth among the Mexican diaspora community. By 2019, they had more than 100,000 followers on Facebook (today they have more than 160,000).
Mercado and Ornelas say that hiring journalists who knew how to convert questions into problems that can be solved with a piece of information has been key.
Journalism students came through a federal program that helped them pay for internships. Conexión Migrante trained them on good customer service practices. “We like to see it as a blend in between that and applying a journalistic mindset to every conversation. They had to try to help the people who were calling, but they also had to think of [whether] this could become a story or a guide,” Ornelas said.
Every time Conexión Migrante receives a question related to things like specific procedures such as “How can I get a divorce from an American citizen?’ the newsroom searches their own archive first for an answer. If it does not already exist, then they write a new guide about it. Today, Conexión Migrante has more than 105 guides which cover issues such as “How to file a complaint for work harassment’” or “What do you need to apply for DACA.”
Today many of the newsroom’s story ideas originate with those two journalists answering the phones. Their job is to be a voice for those who call the newsroom.
As their reputation and reach grow, Conexión Migrante is trying to find the right balance between efficiency (which will allow them to help more people) and intimacy (which has helped them build trust among the people they serve). In early 2020, they launched a Facebook chatbot to answer frequently asked questions.
Then coronavirus arrived
Questions about coronavirus began arriving in March, just as Mexico City issued a stay-at-home order. That means that the journalists could no longer travel to the office to answer the phone line, leaving Mercado on her own.
Conexión alerted their readers that they would be closing the call center due to the pandemic, but that they could bring the questions to the team through Facebook Messenger, particularly their chatbot, and WhatsApp. But, watching the interactions with the chatbot, they realized that the digital-only communication failed to meet a critical need.
“We realized that in this pandemic, maybe our people need to know less actionable information but want to talk more. They need human interaction on the other side. So maybe a chatbot is not the right solution for what we provide to them. They need that person on the other line,” Mercado says.
For now, Conexión Migrante’s phone line is still open and they’re evaluating the response to the chatbot to figure out how to make it “closer and kinder” to the users.
The questions they receive reflect where coronavirus is surging and where it is waning.
“Right now our most popular story is about how to get a driver’s license in New York State because now you can start getting them again. Traffic to the website always follows their needs,” Mercado said in mid-July.
They’re also getting many questions about the process for returning to Mexico, a sign of the economic troubles in the U.S, Ornelas said. As a result, they have pivoted to repatriation coverage, such as how to enroll your child in school after returning to Mexico and how to get a job there.
Conexión Migrante is also working on partnerships with Latino-serving journalism organizations such as Documented NY and Enlace Latino in North Carolina and on developing relationships with more non-media service organizations north of the border to expand the reach of their work.
Launching ‘WikiMigrante’
Conexión Migrante has spent the last few months consolidating all their guides and resources into a “WikiMigrante” which will provide a more streamlined way for migrants to find answers to their questions. Previously readers had to search for specific articles on the site or contact Conexión Migrante directly to find out where to look. The platform launches Aug. 24.
The team’s hope is that WikiMigrante will make it easier to deliver information they already have, giving them more time to help people by phone and answer new questions as they arise. The pandemic only makes this more urgent – until the lockdown is lifted, Mercado is playing the role of switchboard operator, taking all the calls to the phone line and connecting them with the rest of the journalists on her team as they work from home.
We supported the expansion of Conexión Migrante’s call center through our Membership in News Fund, which greenlights promising experiments with membership and audience engagement around the world. That means we gave Conexión Migrante funding, access to a learning community, and venture support for this project.
SEBASTIAN AUYANET
Membership in News Fund coach
@sebauyanet