AfroLA Leverages YESEO to Deliver Critical Information during Wildfires Emergency
When large swaths of Los Angeles County burned from urban wildfires in January, Dana Amihere and her nonprofit newsroom AfroLA had to scale capacity quickly to meet coverage needs. Nine reporters in the field and some additional staffers produced more dedicated stories on the crisis than they typically produce in an entire month.
AfroLA produces news for all Los Angeles residents, but through the lens of the Black community. For a newsroom that does not do breaking news and focuses on solutions journalism, this surge of new content brought a new crisis.
Critical resources were reported focusing on what to have in a go-bag, what to do when returning to a smoke damaged home and where to find free diabetes supplies.
“I was worried about protecting our reporters’ health and safety,” Amihere said. “I was fielding a million emails and working 10-hour or more days while also housing a friend who needed to evacuate. I didn’t have time to think about the ‘little things.’”
“We needed to be accurate with critical information but fast. We are used to having weeks or even months to publish a story. This was a deluge of work, and workflows mattered. Since January, we’ve published 14 stories (and counting) around the wildfires in addition to other new coverage and longform pieces. YESEO really came in handy trying to publish content about the wildfires, as they burned and months after.”
Amihere is primarily responsible for the editing and production of every story that reaches AfroLA’s audience, using a WordPress content management system to publish their stories for the web. She first heard about YESEO through Ryan Restivo’s time as a Reynolds Journalism Institute fellow and installed it after hearing Restivo and Nikita Roy’s session at SRCCON 2023 Creating a roadmap for building your Generative AI products.
“Usually, reporters have a headline and a dek and subheadings in their copy already. But, they can be too long, don’t include enough keywords or are a repeat of text in the copy already,” Amihere said. “I use the /prep function to run the story body copy through YESEO. I can quickly get back suggestions for headlines and description texts for metadata and WordPress post excerpts.”
“It’s a marriage of what the writer proposed and what YESEO suggested. I have to take into consideration our style of writing and style conventions. YESEO is doing the heavy lifting so I can focus on other production details, like visuals and last copy edits. On a deadline, that’s huge.”
Making sure the stories AfroLA tells are exposed to the community is important, especially for one that’s been awarded grants from across the country for its solutions journalism. When YESEO tells Amihere that she can wait and do her favorite TikTok dance, she knows it is time saved to help get ahead on her stories.
“YESEO definitely makes me more thoughtful about the details of web production and making sure our content is discoverable,” Amihere said. “We published a story about a former preschool teacher who was inspired to collect books for Pasadena Unified schools when a school near her Pasadena home burned.”
“Residents from all over Los Angeles County (and even neighboring Ventura County) started emailing and calling thinking we were collecting books for schools. So, AfroLA became a conduit for getting these donated books – all 1,100 of them and counting – into the hands of kids impacted by the Eaton Fire in Altadena at charter and church schools that wouldn’t have access to the same help as PUSD schools. It was a huge win for our newsroom, and a way for us to make a difference in the community in need. It helped us build relationships and trust with community members and organizations that we are still nurturing as we continue to cover the impacts of the Eaton Fire.”
YESEO also helped improve a story on how wildfire smoke disproportionately increased health risks from lead in Black women. Using YESEO has allowed AfroLA to deliver valuable solutions journalism more efficiently for Los Angeles’s Black and other marginalized communities.