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Daniela Gerson

Los Angeels, California

Daniela Gerson is the managing editor of the Alhambra Source. After reporting for newspapers and public radio from New York City, Europe, and Latin America, she moved to Los Angeles in 2008 to do a master’s degree in immigration journalism at USC. She was a staff immigration writer for the New York Sun, and has contributed to the Financial Times Magazine, New York Times, New York Public Radio among other outlets.

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Translating research theory into a multilingual local news website

September 7, 2010
Facing City Hall in Alhambra, California, a predominantly Asian and Latino suburb just east of Los Angeles, a life-size bronze statue of a man sits holding a newspaper. A plaque says the statue is dedicated to the memory of Warner Jenkins, "Alhambra's beloved journalist/chronicler." That is the closest a journalist gets to Alhambra's City Hall most days. Local news coverage in the municipality of roughly 90,000 is severely lacking. What exists tends to be in Chinese or crime coverage in the area's larger dailies.

USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, responding to the dearth of reporting on Alhambra and the challenge of creating a media outlet in an ethnically and linguistically diverse area, launched the Alhambra Project in 2008. Michael Parks, former director of the journalism school and former editor of the Los Angeles Times, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, a communication researcher and director of the Metamorphosis Project, collaborated with support from the Annenberg Foundation. Parks was interested in investigating how local news coverage could better serve communities. Ball-Rokeach, whose research had previously found that the Alhambra area had one of the lowest levels of civic engagement in Los Angeles County, wanted to explore how creating a news product grounded in local needs could improve that level of engagement.

I joined the project in early summer of last year. As a journalist with a background in immigration reporting – and with a smattering of community organizing skills, including managing a Brooklyn farmer's market and running a small non-profit magazine – my assignment was to take the research ideas and help translate them into an online news source grounded in local needs. More...

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