From April through June of 2021, the Record-Journal completed a successful grant-funded 12-week collaborative project called “Providing Trusted COVID-19 Vaccine Information for Latino Communities.” The project was in partnership with Hartford Healthcare, Community Health Center, the United Way of Meriden and Wallingford, the Spanish Community of Wallingford, and La Voz. It was also grant-supported by the Connecticut Health Foundation and the Graustein Memorial Fund.
We brought together an unprecedented collaboration between journalists, medical vaccine experts, Latino community stakeholders, and Latino media partners to target Latino communities locally and statewide with trusted COVID-19 information. Together, we helped create equity in the rate at which Latinos received the COVID-19 vaccine compared to white residents locally.
We provided multimedia content for the Latino communities addressing vaccine hesitancy and combating misinformation with the goal of reducing the gap in vaccination rates between Hispanic and non-Hispanic residents. Content produced included Ask the Expert sessions where readers could submit their questions and get answers from a local medical expert, in-depth stories on the same reader-generated topics, and several mini-profiles asking community stakeholders to share their vaccination experience.
Some statistics from this project include:
-38 bilingual articles produced
-82% of visitors to this content were new visitors to our website
-Total Visitors on Myrecordjournal.com Vaccine Section (Chartbeat): 26,547 visitors in 12 weeks (or 2,212 per week)
-Total Engaged Minutes on Our Website (Chartbeat): 14,269 minutes (237 hours)