I’m Luke DiStefano and I’ll be helping Mark with the newsletter for a while. I’m a student at The College of New Jersey majoring in Journalism & Professional Writing, with a minor in Creative Writing. Outside of this newsletter, I am the Nation & World editor at The Signal newspaper, and I am a published poet—with my poetry collection “the gentlemen gallery” available on Amazon.
This week, Mark talked to Ana Valdez, a multimedia journalist for KWCH 12, a CBS affiliate in Wichita, Kansas. She describes herself as dedicated to sharing bilingual stories, believing that journalism should create impact, and that language should be a bridge, not a barrier. She's a graduate of Emporia State University and CUNY Newmark Journalism School, and comes highly recommended by our former guest, Charlie Spicer of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Valdez’ work with KWCH is a combination of English and Spanish-language reporting. Ana takes a different approach depending on what language she’s working in.
“I think in English I'm a more technical person, like I go ask my questions and try to break it down as easily as I can. But in Spanish, since it's my first language, I think I obviously feel more comfortable speaking and just engaging. And when I'm speaking with a community, sometimes I feel like I'm speaking to a family member of mine,” Valdez said of the nature of being a bilingual journalist and reporter.
“I always think of myself, like I'm two different people, in Spanish and English,” she said.
Valdez has done a great variety of coverage when it comes to her work with the site, such as reporting on a missing dog incident, covering political developments regarding the legality of immigration and birthright citizenship and local level community reporting as schools navigate the rapidly changing immigration laws.
Valdez’ multicultural background informs most of her work. After she moved from Bolivia and earned her bachelor's degree in communication and sociology with a minor in journalism, she helped launch and anchor the first Spanish newscast for Emporia’s local radio station KVOE.
She also started the César Chávez Day program at Emporia State, which works to support first-generation Hispanic students who are pursuing higher education. Valdez was fittingly a part of the university newspaper, where she worked on investigative reports regarding how universities in the Midwest managed food insecurity on campus during the COVID-19 pandemic. This reporting earned her an award from Kansas Collegiate Media.
She’s also an advocate for the The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which “has been opening more opportunities for young journalists like me, who are trying to break into the field and are trying to join and continue telling the stories of our communities,” Valdez said.
Valdez also mentioned that she formed key connections with the International Rescue Committee, specifically their executive director, Sharon Kennedy. You can read more about Kennedy and her work here.
As a young person involved in journalism, my biggest takeaway from this interview was how valuable multicultural and multilingual perspectives are in journalism. This entire industry has dedicated itself to informing the public, and to think that without people like Valdez’s contributions in Spanish many would go without knowing much of this crucial information.
It’s just a more holistic way of framing journalism that I find important, as it can be easy to only see the parts of the industry that we as English speakers immediately understand, when in reality there are entire other communities one can be ignorant to if they don’t keep this multilingual reality in mind.
And that’s why it’s worth listening to this episode. It can be easy sometimes to get comfortable with what we already know about the world and I find that stepping outside that bubble can be a rewarding growing pain. I hope you get something from it as I did in this regard.
