Profile: Daniella Vidal Allee

In March of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit New Hampshire, leadership at New Hampshire Public Radio floated a question to Daniela Vidal Allee: What New Hampshire health news resources were available for Spanish-language speakers in the state? Daniela and colleague Jimmy Gutierrez began researching, reaching out to Spanish-speaking communities. “We found there wasn’t much,” she said. But they believed there could be.

That’s how NHPR’s ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire? began.

Initially, the NHPR team floated the idea of translating NHPR’s COVID blog into Spanish. But, Daniela notes, “the community said it wouldn’t work. NHPR didn’t have much of a relationship or presence in this community. So it would be difficult to get people to the website.”

Instead, they decided to push the news out on a platform Daniela says many people in the Latino community were familiar with and using: WhatsApp. The idea got positive feedback from the community and the program launched, expanding its initial COVID-health-news focus to original features covering Latino communities in New Hampshire. (Noticias en español | New Hampshire Public Radio, nhpr.org)

The team also now produces a series called Visibles, “non-narrated, first-person videos centered on individuals in New Hampshire’s Latino community.” (Visibles: Stories From Our Community | New Hampshire Public Radio, nhpr.org)

This coverage, Daniela says, “creates representation for communities that aren’t as visible.”

That representation is resonating with audiences: “One of the things that’s most striking,” Daniela says, “is that the originally reported stories and series like Visibles, are the top stories each month within the Spanish-language section of the site. Those resonate a lot more with people than just the hard news.”

It may at this point go without saying that Daniela is bilingual, fluent in Spanish and English. Her parents are Colombian immigrants and spoke Spanish in the home, and she has extended family in Colombia.

“Most of my thinking, creativity, writing, come most clearly through English. But Spanish is still a part of who I am and a way to connect with other people, talk to my grandma and cousins,” she says.

Her multiple languages, and her cross-cultural perspective, inspired a sense of obligation for Daniela. “I have this skill set,” she asked herself, “how can I put it to use?”

Conceptualizing, launching and leading ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire? was a natural outgrowth of that sense of mission, and a drive toward journalism that began when she was a teenager.

She’d known she wanted to be a journalist since she was 15. She went to journalism school in Missouri and during that time volunteered at a local public radio station, where she fell in love with the format and decided it would be the focus of her studies. Internships affirmed that love of radio.

“I liked hearing people’s voices, really,” she says of her decision to focus on audio storytelling. “I found writing for the ear to be more fun than writing a magazine piece. I enjoyed including people’s voices — it feels a little more 3D than 2D.”

Providing a platform for the state’s Spanish-speaking voices has led to “good feedback from people; that they appreciate what we do.” Having a news source in Spanish, they say, helps them understand what’s happening in New Hampshire, especially for those still learning English.

And Daniela is continuing to look for ways to improve the program. “We’ve been doing this for two years and trying to find ways to have deeper and broader relationships with individuals in the community,” she says. “We need to figure out what can we do, and invest our time and resources in, that follows the public radio model. There’s room for us to experiment and try different things, and be more present.”