UNC Hussman alumni and faculty serve as role models for Hispanic and Latino student journalists
When UNC Hussman alumna Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez ’98 (Ph.D.) started working for The Boston Globe in 1980, she remembers being the only Hispanic reporter in the newsroom.
In 1982, she served on the planning committee for a National Hispanic Media convention in San Diego. Organized by the California Chicano News Media Association and journalists around the country, the convention was a success, attracting 300 participants.
But Rivas-Rodriguez and the others on the planning committee wanted more. Hispanic journalists in the United States had already started an informal professional network, but after San Diego, the founders decided it was time to create a formal organization to represent their voices.
“The truth of the matter is that there were so few of us in the business in large markets and working for some of the more established news media that we wanted to do things to bring more people into the business and get them to join the ranks and make a difference,” Rivas-Rodriguez said. “And then the other thing is we wanted to improve the coverage of Latinos in the news media.”
That first convention led to the formation of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) organization dedicated to the advancement of Latino and Hispanic journalists that now holds annual conferences and has inspired the founding of 25 professional chapters and 25 student chapters across North America.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s NAHJ student chapter launched in 2020 to create a space for Latino students and to host guest speakers, information sessions and workshops with the goal of building a pipeline to more Latinos in the media industry.
At UNC Hussman, faculty and alumni are following that same mission: working to strengthen representation of Latino and Hispanic journalists while expanding the coverage of stories that affect those communities.
This year, the school’s W. Horace Carter Distinguished Professor Francesca Dillman Carpentier was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity for her multi-year research on a marketing ban on unhealthy food ads in Chile.
Chile first introduced the multi-phased regulations in 2016, mandating front-of-package warning labels on regulated food and drinks — those that exceed established thresholds for calories, sugar, salt or saturated fat — and limiting content that promotes regulated products on television programs that attract a child audience. In 2018, the country expanded this into an outright ban on such content from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. across all television programming.
By 2019, children’s exposure to TV ads for regulated products had dropped by 73%.
Given her background in nutrition, mass communication theory and statistics, Dillman Carpentier joined the Global Food Research Program of the Carolina Population Center and worked with a research team to collect data that monitored the changes in children’s exposure to these products before and after the law was implemented.
She hopes her research will highlight the health progress being made in South American countries like Chile, Peru, Colombia and Argentina that is often not covered in media.
“I think perhaps [my] biggest contribution was to shine a spotlight on these countries in South America who are being bold and tackling this real health issue,” Dillman Carpentier said. “When you are a low or middle-income country, sometimes your voice just isn't as loud as other voices at the table that are representing the high-income countries, but my goodness, the high-income countries really can learn from these other countries in South America.”
Dillman Carpentier also hopes her research will inspire students to take pride in reporting on stories that pertain to their own identity.
“Hopefully the work that we're doing is providing stories that people who have origins in these other countries can feel like they can own,” she said. “They can research, they can champion, they can report on [these stories] far better than somebody who is unfamiliar with the culture and just parachutes in.”
UNC Hussman alumni have also gone on to report on complex stories in their own careers. Andrea Patiño Contreras '16 (M.A.), a video journalist and editor from Colombia, began working for a documentary team at the Spanish-language news outlet after earning her master’s degree at the school. The Univision team’s focus was on immigration, creating multimedia stories in Spanish primarily for an audience of immigrant and Latino communities.
Many in these communities were affected by the policies of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration following his election in 2020. During this time, Contreras and her multimedia team zoomed in on how individual people were affected by the policies, striking a powerful balance of amplifying individual voices while also providing the larger context of why their stories matter.
“As a journalist, you always hope that whatever you work on will change a policy or there will be some kind of tangible change, but more often than not, that doesn't happen,” Contreras said. “But I think stories can have a small impact on people and maybe there's a collective slow change that can then happen.”
Throughout her career — from six years at Univision to The Boston Globe to a freelancing stint to her current journalism fellowship at Harvard — Contreras has seen both the instability and the potential of the journalism industry.
“It's not a lie that it's a difficult career,” Contreras said. “But it feels like an exciting moment in that people are having a lot of conversations about representation and how newsrooms can better represent the communities they are reporting on.”
Dillman Carpentier also said her career path was nonlinear and difficult, but sharing stories about her identity and journey with students has been a powerful way of connecting and inspiring hope.
“Being somebody who can represent people who look like me, I think, was helpful [to my students],” she said. “And then also being able to share my own journey and, by doing that, allowing them to be comfortable with their journey and recognize that even in that group [of Latino descent], their journeys are different, their experiences are different. Just kind of breaking down that assumption that we're one giant monolith in this country and recognizing that we are an incredibly diverse body of individuals.”
Hispanic Heritage Month can be celebrated in a number of ways. But within the halls of UNC Hussman’s Carroll Hall and Curtis Media Center, one way to celebrate this month is by recognizing the faculty, alumni and journalist role models who broke down barriers and fought for bylines and were the first of their background in newsrooms — all so that the industry could be more accessible for future generations of Latino and Hispanic journalists.
“Hispanic Heritage Month invites us to reflect upon the experience of Hispanic people in this country and to learn from that journey,” said Raul Reis, dean of UNC Hussman. “It’s important that our community of students, faculty, staff and alumni recognize and appreciate the contributions that Hispanic people and cultures make to our school, the state and the country.”
In 1982, when Rivas-Rodriguez attended that first convention in San Diego, she knew a lot of the people there. Now, when she attends annual NAHJ conferences, she hardly knows anybody.
“And that's good,” Rivas-Rodriguez said. “It says that there's a lot more people that are coming into the business. I watch network news or read The Washington Post, New York Times, Dallas Morning News, and there's a lot more Hispanic bylines than when I was there — and that has translated into more coverage of Latinos. It’s not perfect, but it’s phenomenal what has been accomplished in one or two generations.”