Instagram News Fellows Elevate Hyperlocal Storytelling About COVID-19

The Instagram Local News Fellowship paired 22 budding journalists with 21 local newsrooms across the US in the summer of 2020. These were no ordinary times. COVID-19 was tearing through the country leaving millions of families impacted – their safety and their economic future upended. The fellows, all recent college graduates or college seniors, were tasked with using their newsrooms’ platforms to connect, serve and engage their local communities with information pertaining to the spread of COVID-19, as well as amplifying safety guidelines as they emerged from local and federal officials.

Moreover, the fellows and their newsrooms paired with BuzzFeed News and USA TODAY to elevate their storytelling to a national level through a series of IGTV videos, shining a much needed spotlight on hyperlocal reporting. “We wanted to humanize how people in cities across the US are being affected by the coronavirus pandemic,” said Laura Montenegro, lead news curation editor at BuzzFeed News.

Three of the fellows – Fatoumata Ceesay with the Chicago Tribune, Sam Forbes with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Erin Gavle with the Philadelphia Inquirer – shared their experience in the video below. Continue reading for takeaways and more project highlights from the fellows.

“To me, journalism isn’t just important, it’s essential. It’s a public service,” fellow Erin Gavle said. For her IGTV project with BuzzFeed News she “focused on how performing artists in Philadelphia are pivoting in the pandemic and getting even more creative to keep art alive.”

“My goal was to make it visually exciting for someone who has never been to Philly and doesn’t know they have a thriving art scene, even in a pandemic,” Gavle explained, adding that “producing content for a community that I am not working in is so daunting. You want to do right by them. I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was misrepresenting their city or their work. It felt like a real honor to elevate a local story to a bigger audience and show it to more people.”

“For our project, we decided to focus on Black voter turnout in Chicago specifically,” fellow Fatoumata Ceesay explained, citing an historically low voter turnout among Black voters in Chicago in the 2016 US presidential election as the catalyst to creating her BuzzFeed News IGTV video in collaboration with fellow Juliana Tornabene.

“As a Black woman, voting is very important to me,” Ceesay said, adding that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on communities of color as well as protests for racial justice reframed the urgency to include diverse voices in the upcoming election. Ceesay and Tornabene rounded out their storytelling by profiling local organizations that mobilize voter registration and civic engagement. “I’m really proud of what we created,” she added, “I hope people understand that their vote matters, that they matter as a person and their voice needs to be heard.”

“The feedback that we received on these videos was overwhelmingly positive,” BuzzFeed News’ Laura Montenegro said. “Many of our followers shared how thankful they were that we were bringing awareness to issues their communities are currently facing. Others told us how insightful and informative they found the videos to be.”

Fellow Sam Forbes created his IGTV video for USA TODAY about a community “that was being marginalized and forgotten,” Forbes said, describing a Latinx community in southeast Wisconsin.

A challenging aspect to production, aside from doing so remotely, was securing interviews with subjects that might be apprehensive to appear on camera. Forbes collaborated with a local organization that deals with immigrants’ rights issues in Milwaukee to reach out to sources.

“COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted minority communities all across the country, and it is an ongoing issue,” Forbes said. “These are people still feeling the effects of job loss, family members who died. These are stories that need to be told and I hope that by telling the story of this community, people are made aware of what is happening across the country.”

Others in the fellowship cohort detailed the impact COVID-19 had on their publishers’ communities through IGTV, as well as Feed posts, Stories and Live.

Fellow Danya Gil with the Salt Lake Tribune created a moving memorial in Feed to lives lost to COVID-19 in Utah. She used images provided by friends and families and arranged them in the shape of the state of Utah, then followed up with weekly Instagram Stories, saved to a Highlight, to share memories from loved ones. Her work extended to the IGTV she created for BuzzFeed News, where she spoke to local leaders and community members to see how the initial COVID-19 response impacted Hispanics in Utah and what was being done to better serve the community.

Emily Linderman, a fellow with Mundo Hispanico, created carousel cards in Feed that outlined testing sites, in both map and list form, in Hispanic communities across the country, thus providing a shareable, easily digestible service for the audience.

Cincinnati Enquirer fellow Lauryn Haas used the Question sticker in Stories to collect inquiries on COVID-19, then turned answers to commonly asked questions into carousel posts in Feed. She branded the series “Hey, Enquirer” and leveraged newsroom resources, primarily articles on the Enquirer’s website, to provide information to its audience on Instagram. Questions pertaining to schools reopening prompted the creation of her IGTV video for USA Today, that showed parents and teachers navigating the complexity of launching into a new school year amid COVID-19.