I spoke last night to a UCLA Extension class on news features in Spanish-language media. Co-teacher Pilar Marrero, an editor and columnist at La Opinion, invited me. (Jose Luis Sierra of Univision is the other teacher.) It was a real cool, real engaged group of adult students who seemed eager to become reporters and conscious of the complexities of the issues that afflict modern media and journalism. I told them about my belief that journalism is learned by doing it, about how I learned all the fundamentals doing cops reporting at Berkeley and when I started at the L.A. Times, about how covering last year's immigrant-rights marches for the LA Weekly allowed me to explore a different approach to news reporting, about my belief that "objectivity" should be a starting-off principle in news writing and not the blind goal. Oh, and, how it's critical to back up every fact you report with documents, as often as possible.
They had lots of challenging questions, which I answered in Spanish (with a little Spanglish thrown in, of course). They asked me what it was like being a young person and a Latino at the Times when the paper has hardly any of either, what I think of the Spanish-language press in L.A., and what I would like to see in a newspaper of the new generation. Two basic themes to my answer: A) We're a bilingual city, a bilingual market, a place that is actually generating a new hybrid language, but there is not yet a viable, trustworthy bilingual news media. (We already have bilingual music/pop television e.g. MTV Tr3s, LATV, mun2, etc., but there is no news outlet speaking to that huge, growing, and growing up population that walks between two worlds and two languages.) B) Responding to globalization, to the concerns of young people. News media still regard their audiences as provincial and insular, unaware that the Internet is generating a global culture, where people all over the world are shedding centuries of distance and difference and becoming every day more and more alike. Nationalism, thank goodness, will soon be obsolete. And I feel youth understand this. ... Or something like that.
When I left, I said "Y muy buena suerte," and I meant it truly. "Muchas gracias," the entire room said, almost in unision.
Speaking of speaking, last week was the L.A. Press Club panel on immigration and the media that I sat on and I have to say I was very nervous at first but after it got going it turned out to be a very lively, satisfying conversation. There was no Fox News-style idiocy. The only time I got a bit riled up was when some question moved me to say something to the effect of, 'Look, this is not just an American problem, but the American media doesn't tell you that. Prosperous countries all over the world are dealing with illegal immigration, from Spain, to the U.K., to Japan. We need to start understanding this as a global phenomenon that's a result of the globalizing economy.' ... I think I also said protests are "stupid" and that I don't trust the left or the right. Or something like that.
* Photo from Univision.