Reporting on Immigration Issues
Written by Debra Klevens, CJE, Director-at-Large
With immigration issues affecting communities across the United States, student journalists may want some help and support to do this type of reporting in a responsible way.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists has released some guidelines for reporting on immigration issues that provide helpful best practices to adhere to journalistic ethics.
The 10 guidelines all provide not just the overarching guideline but the reasoning behind them and best practices to consider during the reporting process.
https://nahj.org/immigration-guidelines/
This topic, and the political climate surrounding the topic, also affords itself to an important lesson in protecting sources. Paul Kandell, journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School and adviser to The Paly Voice and Verde magazine, shares some of the topics he used as a teachable moment.
“[This is] such an important topic,” Kandell said in a post on the JEA Listserve in January. “The new focus on the immigration status of sources and community members brings a need for extra scrutiny on data security practices students deploy in their journalistic work.”
The conversations he spoke to his students about:
- Avoiding putting sensitive data in shared or publicly accessible locations.
- Avoiding using school devices for processing or sharing sensitive information
- Avoiding sending sensitive information over school wifi or networks
- Thinking extra hard about all those audio files and transcripts generated by their bottomless use of the Otter app and similar recording/transcription services. If those files contain sensitive information, they do not belong on any of the above. (I should say here that I don't know right now the degree to which Otter might let its files be compromised by law enforcement in a pinch, so maybe such recordings are ultimately risky anyway. [Does anyone know the answer to this?])
- Not conducting sensitive interviews in publically viewable spaces on campus, where an observer might put two and two together and realize later the identity of a supposedly anonymous source.
- Deleting sensitive files rather than leaving them lingering in places they might be accessed later by force. (I was always taught to keep my interview notes to be able to prove who said what and when, but I think there's a counter argument that says we should be throwing out lots of interview notes now.)
“The point is not to be political,” Kandell said in his post to the JEA Listserve. “The point is that I don't think my students will want to learn after publication that their unpublished data was responsible for consequences they did not intend. They don't need that on their conscience.”
There is also a digital security checklist from the Freedom of the Press Foundation that provides more conversation points about the security of student’s personal and journalistic data.
Additional resources for students to do this work:
A resource for providing culturally sensitive coverage from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists:
https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/journalists-digital-security-checklist/
Resource for using anonymous sources:
Student examples of immigration coverage:
https://bronxrivernews.org/2024/12/financial-aid-or-possible-deportation/
Contributors to this post:
Adriana Chavira, Daniel Pearl Magnet High School
Paul Kandell, Palo Alto High School