The University of Nevada, Reno’s bilingual student news outlet, Noticiero Móvil, celebrated its 10-year anniversary in October. (The name is a rough translation of “pop-up newsroom.”)
During a celebration on campus on Oct. 23, Kari Barber, associate dean of UNR’s journalism school, said its founder, Vanessa Vancour, mentioned her dream for Noticiero Móvil during her job interview in 2015.
Vancour was hired as a faculty member, and she launched Noticiero Móvil with a $35,000 grant from the Online News Association Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education, earmarked for bilingual multimedia news coverage of the 2016 presidential election.
“When I founded Noticiero in 2015, we did not know what we were really building,” Vancour said during the celebration. “But what I did know is that Spanish-speaking communities deserved to see themselves reflected in local news, and I also knew that our students deserved the chance to report in both languages, and to be taken seriously for their work.”
Since then, Noticiero Móvil has trained more than 100 UNR students in reporting, multimedia news, graphic design and public relations. Some are native English speakers; a few are fluent Spanish speakers. Many are somewhere in between.
“Most people here may have a pretty good understanding of Spanish, because they probably grew up in a Hispanic household, but they’re not totally fluent,” said Maria Palma, who moved to Reno from Chile to study at UNR. She was one of several former Noticiero reporters who spoke in videos played at the anniversary event.
Claudia Cruz, a journalism faculty member who has been Noticiero Móvil’s director since 2020, said that part of the challenge for student reporters has been figuring out how to make Spanish content that’s accessible to speakers at different levels. She said that when the group needs a news article translated, she’ll sometimes call in a Spanish 400 student.
Cruz noted that collaborations have been a critical part of Noticiero Móvil from the outset. In addition to the Spanish department, the group has worked with local news outlets including The Nevada Independent.
Alumni have gone on to work with various news outlets, both local and beyond, including NBC Bay Area news and The Washington Post. Palma, who graduated with a master’s in journalism in 2022, is now a full-time reporter at KUNR, where she reports on Lake Tahoe-area news and also hosts the weekly Spanish-language news segment Al Aire.
Noticiero Móvil reporters have earned major awards in student journalism, most notably alum Stephanie Serrano’s regional Edward R. Murrow Award for her coverage of Reno 1868 FC, the area’s professional soccer team at the time; the story was broadcast on KUNR in 2017. “I typically describe it as, like, the Emmy for broadcast news,” said Cruz.
In March, a group of Noticiero Móvil reporters went to Costa Rica to delve into multimedia science reporting. Another group traveled to Paris and interviewed Telemundo anchors at the 2024 Olympics.
In 2026, Noticiero Móvil will be featured as a case study in two forthcoming journalism textbooks.
To learn more, visit noticieromovil.com.