This first-generation college graduate got her start in journalism through Documenters and is now an engagement reporter at the Fresno Bee.
By India Daniels and Bettina Chang
Isabel Dieppa took a “winding road” into journalism, she says. The oldest of four siblings, she grew up in Puerto Rico and Cleveland, moving back and forth often. She took a train and two buses every day to get to high school in Cleveland, which she completed in just three years while working to earn income. She moved back to Puerto Rico for college, then ended up stateside freelancing in Chicago.
“It was really hard to be able to obtain education mostly because of finances,” she says. Though she was accepted in Northwestern’s grad school for journalism, she couldn’t afford to enroll because they only offered a partial scholarship. That’s when she met a local journalist who told her about City Bureau.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you get involved in Documenters and journalism?
I applied for the Civic Reporting Fellowship first, but I didn't get it and I was told actually I should do Documenters. Through that program, I attended meetings at least twice a month. Not only did I learn how to take notes and live tweet, and I started to figure out how public meetings work, and how there are stories that are easy to overlook there. Then I started to get really strong ideas for stories, or enterprise stories that needed to be looked into. I started asking more questions.
And so basically, I learned journalism through programs like Documenters and other types of fellowships. And now I have a staff job as engagement reporter at the Fresno Bee in California.
Why is the work of Documenters important?
I'm at a public meeting to highlight what people are saying. Our job is not to give someone a voice, but to give someone a megaphone, because they already have a voice. Documenters notes are there as historical evidence, so it’s not just said in a room and it falls upon deaf ears. You can go back and say, "Hey, on this date, these 10 people talked exactly about this problem, and [elected officials] didn't do anything about it." That's where journalists come in—you have receipts, you have evidence to hold people accountable.
You see unfairness over and over and over again. Inequity is a serious issue. It's not about activists or liberals, it's just the world that we are living in. If we want to live in a better world, we need to think more equitably about people that live here, because we don't exist in a vacuum.
What’s it like to go to so many public meetings? What have you learned?
It’s a lot more visceral and emotional than you might think, when you’re in the room with someone who's so impassioned, raising their voice and expressing a wrong that they have been through. You see the board members who actively listen. You see the board members who disrespectfully stand up and walk to a corner and talk to someone else.
I think government entities need to stop making decisions based on the limited information. If 10 people have a public comment against something, maybe you shouldn't make that decision that day—clearly, more discussion needs to happen. If you approve something unanimously anyway, this was all just theater. The role of the media is to continue to uplift these voices and start to investigate and hold people accountable.
What did you get out of your time with City Bureau and the Documenters program?
I learned a lot of skills that helped me to not just be a better citizen but also inform the type of work that I want to do. It’s learning what questions to ask, learning how to live-tweet something and do it the best way to help people understand, this matters, this is important. Before Documenters, I knew about the issues—because I've always known that we live in a broken world—but I wasn't able to pinpoint it. And now I feel like I have more tools.
I've learned from other Documenters about certain civic issues. It’s this cool Wikipedia-esque rabbit hole, because there's more of us Documenting, we can keep each other more accurate. It’s building a community that kind of feeds itself. I follow a lot of Documenters on social media, some of them I know in person. I am excited because now I have these tools and I'm living in California and I'm taking these tools with me to try to continue to spread positive seeds that can help create a more inclusive journalism, a more and more inclusive civic environment.
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