Bilingual news consumption among Latinos in Washoe County
What a community survey created by the bilingual multimedia outlet Noticiero Móvil tells us about the needs of Northern Nevada’s Latino population.
Survey analyzed by Alejo Cruz and conducted by Nia Black, Melissa Bustos, Josue Ponce, Kiana Reynolds, Mia Alvarez, Kristy Tartaglini, and Claudia Cruz
To celebrate the ten years of reporting at Noticiero Móvil, we are honored to reveal the results of an outreach survey conducted after we teamed up with students enrolled in Spanish Service Learning program at the University of Nevada, Reno.
For the past three years, interns have gone offline and on to the streets directly engaging with Northern Nevada’s Latino community. To better understand the voices that we strive to amplify, this in-depth survey was distributed in both Spanish and English with one goal in mind: to be what the community wants. A way to help us help you.
After reaching our target number of respondents, it was time for us to listen. Here’s what we’ve learned about the consumers of bilingual news in Washoe County.
How We Did This [Our Methodology]
Noticiero Móvil conducted this survey to understand the habits of Northern Nevada’s Latino population around news and information. This included questions about languages and levels of engagement with Hispanic media outlets in the region.
This Noticero Móvil Community Survey was a collaboration between the Reynolds School of Journalism and the Office of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement at the University of Nevada, Reno. The questions in this report were created by the Noticiero Móvil team. Responses were collected from starting Spring 2022 until Fall 2024. During that time, eight students over the span of five semesters participated in the data collection process. Of the eight, six were Service-Learning students from the Spanish major.
The survey did not follow the strict requirements of a traditional institutional survey. The questions were not pre-tested prior to distribution. This will be different for future surveys.
We collected a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from the participants. To ensure that the survey reflected a balanced representation of Washoe County’s Latino population, data was collected both on and offline.
The surveyors helped facilitate some surveys. Participants were asked to respond to a total of 34 questions. The questions varied from multiple-choice, closed-ended, rating-scale and Likert-scale models. This survey was released in English and Spanish to reach Washoe County’s Spanish-speaking population. The online version was created using Google Forms.
In this report, the survey results have been combined to provide a comprehensive community sentiment. However, future data synthesis may require the data to remain separate for diversified results. The raw data provides us with an accurate depiction of the habits of both populations.
There are a variety of reasons as to why respondents would choose to not reply to certain questions. Their reasoning was not recorded for the purposes of this survey. The data cleansing process detected and corrected inconsistencies in the data to improve the quality and reliability of the information.
Noticiero Móvil Community Survey Participants
The survey participants were determined based on the following interests: those interested in receiving news in Spanish about the Latino community and those interested in receiving news in English about the Latino community.
When asked if participants had heard of Noticiero Móvil, nearly 62% of people said “no.”
There are a variety of factors that could have played into this. In 2020, Noticiero Móvil underwent a transition of leadership. This was the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 disrupted any physical outreach to the community. Student reporters were unable to directly interact with our target demographic, stunting any growth that might have happened otherwise.
Regardless of the drop in outreach, Noticiero Móvil has continued to be awarded grants and national recognition for its bilingual multimedia news coverage.
Race and Ethnicity
The Reno-Sparks metropolitan area has seen an increase of Latino residents in recent years. U.S. Census data from 2021 has reported that the Reno Latino community has reached a little over 23%, while the City of Sparks has found itself nearing 35%. Noticiero Móvil has found its way to its target audience with 90% of survey participants identifying as Latino or Hispanic. [chart]
Spanish is spoken in 19.5% of Reno households. What does this mean for the need of bilingual media in Northern Nevada?
Survey results reveal that 59.3% of the Latino community in Reno would like to interact with Noticiero Móvil publications in both Spanish and English with an additional 19.5% expressing a preference for Spanish-only engagement.
Social media, however, tells a slightly different story.
Our results show that 40.7% of Latinos prefer social media content published in Spanish. Meanwhile, interest in both Spanish and English content was at 38%.
Across the board, 78.8% of respondents wanted access to content in Spanish whether it be in full or through bilingual content. This appears to support the need for Spanish-news coverage in Washoe County.
Sex and Gender Identity
Women make up 49% of the Reno Metro Area. After noticing the influx of female respondents, Noticiero Móvil sought out more male participants to accurately reflect the gender distribution of Northern Nevada.
Nearly 70% of respondents identified themselves as cisgender females. Twenty-four percent identified as cisgender male, while 6% of respondents were genderqueer.
By Education
The varying education levels amongst our target audience demonstrates the importance of socioeconomic diversity. Of the 118 participants, 45.2% have completed some form of higher education ranging from Associate’s Degrees to Doctorates. Nearly 30% have some experience with higher education, while 21.7% have completed high school or received a GED diploma.
This shows Noticiero Móvil that the content we produce is at a level that is accessible to our general audience. What interests us now is how our audience likes to consume their news.
Regardless of education level, over 30% of Latinos in the community would like more online video stories either through the Noticiero Móvil website or on social media.
However, a quarter of Latinos with exposure to higher education have expressed interest in the development of more in-person community events.
This differs from the reported preferences of Latinos with no previous higher education experience. Twenty-seven percent of these respondents would rather see more written news stories. There is a general interest for a podcast across both groups.
By Area
For the past decade, Noticiero Móvil has been dedicated to offering news in Spanish and English for Northern Nevada. This survey has provided us with insight as to where our target audience calls home. Though respondents ranged from all over the Reno-Sparks metropolitan area, there was a large concentration of community members from Reno’s 3rd and 5th Ward.
Survey results have brought Ward 4, that’s North Valley and Lemon Valley, to our attention whose number of participants narrowly beat out Sparks.
Sun Valley, an unincorporated area in Washoe County, is sometimes overlooked when discussing the Washoe County population at-large. However, there were a significant number of participants from this area. This presented a need for the inclusion of Sun Valley in our data and future reporting.
