inside the station By Vicki Louk Balint
Fronteras: The Changing America Desk New KJZZ initiative aims to understand the Southwest through stories.
The Café Justo story focused on the border town, Agua Prieta. But the coverage of Fronteras, the project it inspired, will span the entire Southwest.
10 Wavelength
JZZ reporter Nadine Arroyo Rodriguez was following a story about coffee. She’d heard about Café Justo, a coffee roasting cooperative located in Agua Prieta, Mexico, just over the border from Douglas, Arizona. She figured she’d report on free trade and some lively entrepreneurs, and the challenge of roasting, marketing and selling the organic Arabica and Marago
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feed their family, a way to care for them,” says Rodriguez. “This cooperative has kept young men from crossing the border.” Listeners will hear more indepth coverage like the Café Justo story this fall when KJZZ launches Fronteras: The Changing America Desk. Funded by a $1.5 million dollar grant by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), newly hired reporters will explore the changing culture and demographics of the Southwest, with an emphasis on Latino and Native American life. They’ll also look at how border issues affect American politics, social order and the environment. It’s an ambitious task for a local station that until fairly recently broadcast a meager menu of original, local news programming. But the Fronteras project, along with the hiring of three investigative reporters and the revival of the blends online, at a profit, to coffee youth media project, indicates aficionados in the U.S. and Canada. that innovation is in the works at But beyond the beans and the KJZZ. With a solid staff—and solid financial footing—the blends, another story emerged. station stands poised to catch up Interviews in Agua Prieta led its news coverage with the rapid Rodriguez two thousand miles south, to the tiny town of Salvador growth of the Valley. “There’s a Urbina, in Chiapas, Mexico, where latent, pent-up demand for the station to shine even brighter,” the beans are grown. She found says KJZZ general manager Jim that because of the Café Justo Paluzzi. “It is our turn to shine.” cooperative, coffee farmers sell The genesis for the Fronteras their beans for a fair price and concept is change. Research led earn enough money to live on. by the Brookings Institution That fosters economic developconcluded the Southwest is in ment in their small town, where transition, says Paluzzi—changing typically jobs are scarce and wages are low. “All they’re looking at a velocity greater than anywhere else in the United States. for, as they tell me, is a way to