About El Tímpano

El Tímpano

El Tímpano is a nonprofit news and civic engagement organization based in Oakland, California, serving Latino and Mayan immigrants in Oakland and the wider San Francisco Bay Area. Its name is Spanish for eardrum, and listening is its method: El Tímpano informs, engages and amplifies the voices of its community largely through a two-way text-messaging service in Spanish, supplemented by in-depth reporting, resource guides, videos in the Mam language and in-person outreach where its audience actually gathers.

Founded in 2018, El Tímpano was designed from the start with its audience, not merely for it. A participatory design process involving hundreds of residents shaped how it works, and its reporting begins with questions and concerns that community members send in — on health, housing, education, immigration and emergency information — which its journalists then investigate and answer.

A Media Desert in East Oakland

El Tímpano's founding director, Madeleine Bair, set out to address a clear gap. East Oakland's Latino immigrant community had grown faster than any other in the city over two decades, while Spanish-language local news options shrank. For many Bay Area Latino immigrants, the extent of local news was a daily half-hour broadcast from Univision or Telemundo covering the entire nine-county region — useful, but not Oakland news.

Bair, a journalist and community media practitioner, launched El Tímpano in 2018 after a nine-month participatory design process that involved hundreds of residents and dozens of community leaders from Oakland's Latino and Mayan immigrant communities. Early support included a seed grant from The Pollination Project, which helped the new nonprofit build a full website to explain its mission and team to partners, volunteers and funders.

Why Text Messages

The organization's signature insight is about access. Many Latino immigrants lack a computer or home internet, but nearly everyone has a cell phone. So El Tímpano built its core service on SMS: subscribers receive timely, actionable news and information by text, and can reply with questions, concerns or stories.

Its early pilot, called Pasa La Voz — Spanish for spread the word — ran for three months and was designed from feedback from hundreds of residents about what they wanted from local media, what issues mattered to them and how information should be delivered. Each week subscribers received news, resources or information on topics such as health, housing, education, emergency preparedness and immigration, and were invited to respond on that issue. That feedback loop became the permanent model.

How Big the Listening Post Is

El Tímpano's text service has reached a significant share of its intended community. Gather, a journalism engagement platform, reported that it connected with more than ten percent of Oakland's Spanish-speaking households; the organization's own partnership materials put its weekly text reach at fifteen percent of Oakland's Spanish-speaking households, across more than seventy Bay Area municipalities, with more than 6,000 Spanish-speaking immigrants in its SMS community in recent reporting.

Those partnership materials also describe who is being reached: more than 700 subscribers are Maya Mam speakers, about three-quarters of the audience are women, half lack a home computer, and more than half earn less than $40,000 a year. In other words, El Tímpano reaches precisely the residents conventional digital news — published on websites, promoted on social media — most often misses.

Participatory and Accountability Reporting

Immigrants are not only El Tímpano's audience; they are the foundation of its journalism. Reporters investigate concerns the audience raises, and community members' experiences become the evidence in accountability stories. Its partnerships with wider outlets — including KQED, Latino USA, El Tecolote, The Oaklandside and The World — carry that reporting to broader audiences.

A recent example is its collaboration with KFF Health News on immigrant seniors losing Medicare coverage despite having paid into the program, built around the experience of an Oakland resident and educator who had contributed to Medicare and Social Security over twenty-four years. Local reporters, public health leaders and the office of California's governor have credited El Tímpano's reporting with illuminating the toll of COVID-19 on Latino and Mayan immigrants, an impact that began with its text-based reporting during the pandemic.

COVID-19, Housing and the Infodemic

The pandemic proved the model. From March 2020, El Tímpano collected stories from nearly a thousand text subscribers about the toll of coronavirus on their health, homes and livelihoods — lost jobs, unpaid rent, and fear that renter protections would expire or not be honored. A $5,000 investigative reporting stipend from the Local Media Association's Fund for Local Journalism supported reporting, in collaboration with The Oaklandside, on COVID-19's impact on evictions and displacement in Oakland's Latinx and Mayan communities.

Its disinformation workshops, begun during the pandemic in 2021 and led by community outreach coordinator Etel Calles, teach participants to identify misinformation and stop it spreading in the Spanish-speaking community — held wherever there is a safe place, from flea markets to laundromats to schools. By 2023 the workshops had helped around 100 East Bay community members, and demand rose again with renewed immigration enforcement fears. The same verification approach is applied to rumors of immigration raids shared to its text line.

Service Journalism and Resource Guides

Much of El Tímpano's daily value is service journalism: clear, Spanish-language answers about Medi-Cal and health care, housing rights, schools, sanctuary city protections and immigration court, delivered by text and collected in a resource guide for the East Bay's Latino and Mayan immigrants. Its pocket-sized printed guide has been distributed with the Oakland Public Library, Alameda County Library and Contra Costa Library at twenty-seven branches across the East Bay, recognizing that print in a trusted place still matters to its audience.

Its Tumil videos provide information, news and resources in Mam, an Indigenous Mayan language spoken by Oakland's growing Mam community — a community almost entirely unserved by other local media. Serving Mam speakers, not only Spanish speakers, is one of the clearest expressions of how specifically El Tímpano defines its public.

Team and Community Roles

El Tímpano is a remote-first workplace whose staff must be based in the Bay Area for in-person outreach. Its community reporter role — responsible for engaging the Spanish-speaking audience through the text service, researching and reporting issues subscribers raise, and maintaining the feedback loop between the SMS community and its editorial and civic engagement teams — describes the newsroom's structure in miniature.

Reporters such as senior health equity reporter Vanessa G. Sánchez, whose newsletter column Ear to the Ground shares what the SMS community is asking — for example about Oakland's City of Refuge sanctuary ordinance, immigration rights and school alerts — show how the newsroom publicly closes the loop: questions come in by text, and answers, reporting and resources go back out the same way.

Recognition and Role in the Field

El Tímpano describes itself as an award-winning organization, and it is frequently held up in journalism circles as a model of audience-centered design: build the delivery system your community can actually use, earn trust by answering real questions, and let the community's concerns set the investigative agenda. Case studies by Gather and the Reynolds Journalism Institute have documented its pilot and its results, and its approach has influenced how funders and newsrooms think about serving immigrant audiences.

It also functions as a partner for civic agencies and community organizations that need to reach Latino and Maya Mam immigrants authentically, overcoming barriers of language, digital inequity, education and distrust.

Why El Tímpano Matters

El Tímpano — the outlet's full name includes the accent, though it often appears without it — serves a Bay Area population it sizes at 1.8 million Latino and Mayan immigrants. Its wager is that journalism for this public has to begin with an eardrum, not a printing press or a homepage: listen first, in Spanish and Mam, on the phones people already have, and then report.

Based in Oakland and publishing at eltimpano.org, it remains one of the clearest American examples of community-powered local news — a newsroom whose beat, sources, distribution and accountability all run through the same two-way conversation with the immigrants it exists to serve.