Over the past five months, the Center for Community Media (CCM) has built a network of outlets that serve and cover communities all along the southern U.S. border, from San Diego and Tijuana, to El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, to Brownsville and Matamoros. Today, we are launching a map and directory of community media outlets in the CCM Border Network that serve this vast, porous, and hard-to-define region.
In the directory, you’ll find the names and contact information of 50 outlets in cities and towns spanning four U.S. states, bordering six states in Mexico, publishing in both English and Spanish. They range from local newspapers and decades-old community radio stations to innovative digital news services and new multimedia platforms. You can sort the database by location, format, language, and even business model.
Newspapers like the Del Rio News-Herald in southwestern Texas or Las Cruces Sun-News in New Mexico, at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, have served their communities since the 1880s. There are also newer digital outlets: El Paso Matters launched in 2019 to engage the interconnected communities in and around El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez in Mexico; and Conecta Arizona, which launched this past spring to connect Spanish-speakers in Arizona to information about the COVID-19 pandemic, now publishes a Spanish-language news service on WhatsApp. Other outlets speak directly to their communities in broadcast and now podcast. Beyond Borders Gazette, a bilingual monthly magazine published in El Centro, California, has recently launched a podcast. Local television or cable affiliates join community radio broadcasters, like Marfa Public Radio in Texas, or California’s Voice of San Diego, in serving regions where internet connections are often spotty and where known local voices have earned their communities’ trust.
From 5,000 feet, you might see larger clusters in certain cities, but before you draw any conclusions about whose voices are most represented in journalism along the border, hone in on those hubs and find perspectives, concerns, and narrative lenses that vary across neighborhoods and communities, even in the same town.
We tried to map every local news outlet on the southern U.S. border, but we probably missed some. If you know of any outlets reporting along the border that we should include in the directory please let us know: ccm@journalism.cuny.edu.