Martina Guzmán of Planet Detroit: Transcript March 3, 2025

Rachel Jones/NPF (00:02):

Session one of the first 2025 widening the pipeline virtual training. We’ll focus on adding contextual depth to one of the most urgent issues in America today, immigration and the impact of policies that play out in communities. Our first conversation centers on identifying myths and disinformation in immigrant communities from a journalist who created a free to use tool that helps other journalists, that helps other journalists investigate the impact in immigrant communities. Martina Guzman is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker known for her work for covering race, justice and systemic inequality. She is the director of community journalism at Planet Detroit, where she leads the neighborhood reporting lab and mentors residents to tell community stories. Martinez is also a 2023 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and she’s the founder of the Race and Justice Reporting Initiative at the Damon j Keith Center for Civil Rights. Today, Martinez is going to tell us about how reporting on immigrant communities influenced her to develop the Verda app, which uses state-of-the-art audio transcription and AI translation technologies to capture and process audio streams. And this allows for highly accurate, simultaneous monitoring of multiple radio stations across the country. Martina, thank you so much for joining us today.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (01:52):

Oh my God, you’re so welcome. So happy to see everyone’s faces and be here.

Rachel Jones/NPF (01:57):

So I know that you are going to walk us through how Verdade works and give us a great deal of insight into the development of the app. But before you do that, why don’t you start by giving us a little background on your lived experience and how you became a journalist?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (02:14):

Yeah, hi everyone. I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. I’m the daughter of immigrants. My parents both came in the 1960s. My father to work in the world of the auto industry, he worked at a steel factory. And so all of my siblings were raised here. I mean, I think my father’s story and his immigrant story really had an impact on me on how poorly he was treated working in a factory, and how even when he had horrible debilitating injuries, there was absolutely no care for him, and it sort of ruined our financial life. He was never able to get the kind of compensation he should have deserved. And I think that struggle was a thread in fighting for justice and understanding right and wrong, and which ultimately initially led me to I wanted to be a photojournalist, a photographer. And from photojournalism, I then ended up going to radio.

(03:26):

I fell in love with radio after being an avid NPR listener, and then went to filmmaking and started making documentary films and then ultimately ended up writing, which is at a place I’m really comfortable at now. But when you grow up in immigrant communities, when you grow up in black and brown communities, you often see a lot of injustice. You see it in the lack of resources in education. You see it in crime, you see it in all kinds of ways. The lack of economic mobility and the ability to find good jobs or being around a culture of people who don’t necessarily want to go to college or be better. All of those things shape you, and they definitely shaped me. And I think as a result of that, it took me a very long time to graduate from undergrad, the poverty being poor and having to pay for my own school. Sometimes it just felt too much like I couldn’t do it, and then I would quit and start working again, and then I would like, no, I want to finish and go back. And it took me a long time to finish my undergraduate degree. So I think the combination of all of those things really had an impact on my sense of justice, which then would ultimately lead into this idea of right and wrong and truth telling when it came to being a journalist.

Rachel Jones/NPF (05:02):

So in our prep conversation, first of all, you should know that I worked at the Detroit Free Press from 94 to 97. And so Detroit is truly feels almost like a second or third home to me. I made so many friends there and learned so much. But when we talk about using journalism to sort of explore immigrant communities, there’s always this duality about how we should, if we’re classically trained as journalists, remain sort of objective, keep it at arms’ length and go into just tell the story and just the facts. So talk to me about early in your career how you sort of juggled those two things.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (05:54):

Well, I think since very early, well, first of all, I was just interested in telling stories about my own community. I was often people try to push me away from that, oh, you don’t want to be the Latina that covers Latina issues. You just want to be the Latina who’s a great reporter, period. And I was kind of told that often, and I had to get real with myself that, no, I’m actually really interested in reporting in my community. I’m really interested in telling those stories, and I’m committed to telling them comprehensively, not just when there’s Cinco de Mayo or not just when there’s some horrible immigration story, but covering the community year round, which ultimately led me to really develop deep, deep connections in certain communities. And yes, I fundamentally believe that you can be objective, but the mere fact of you telling a story, and I’ll give you a quick example. So I wanted to tell the story about how many of you are familiar with quinceaneras?

(07:00):

So I wanted to tell the story about quinceaneras, and they were just like one, they thought it was a fluff piece. Two, they thought that it was not very relevant that how was beyond a fluff piece, so to say. But I was able to bring back the facts that quinceaneras are a booming economic driver, huge. They cost what weddings cost. They have expos where vendors come from everywhere to Detroit to set up at the beginning of quinceanera season, which would be either in the late fall or early January. And you have photographers and DJs and event planners and caterers and all of these people. And I was able to give numbers and being like, this is how much of an economic driver this is, how many businesses are used, this is how much people make. And I was able to get figures from a woman who was just starting, who had just started a few years ago and based on doing quinceaneras alone, had tripled her business. So it was an economic development story, it was a culture story, and it was kind of like a business story. And I was able to make the case that yes, I can sort of still love that I’m telling the story about this beautiful cultural experience, but give hard numbers behind it so that people can understand how these drive the economy, how these drive small businesses. So you can do both.

Rachel Jones/NPF (08:41):

That is such a powerful lesson for the Widening fellows to learn because we’ve talked so much about representation matters, but also being a voice at the table, being at the very root of story development and having a participation in those decisions. So thank you for that example. I want to bring us to the development of, and you told me in our early conversation about you were reporting on immigrant communities and this issue of mis and disinformation just sort of struck you and tell us about how the, their early stages of the development of the app.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (09:23):

Yeah, so I was working on a national series. I was doing it with an organization called Feet in Two Worlds, and they mentored young journalists of color, specifically bipoc and ethnic communities, journalists, to report in their own communities. We were doing this national series on kind of where Latinos are, and it was right around the midterms, and we hadn’t sort of broadly covered that community. So I was for a long time, and I wanted to reach out and kind of call sources that I’d had across the country and ask them what were they seeing, what were they hearing, what was going on in the south, what was going on in the Midwest, what was going on in the East coast? I wanted to really cover the gamut of what was happening with Latinos across the board. A source, a very credible source, tipped me off that foreign agents were buying airtime on Spanish language radio stations. And I was gobsmacked. I was like, wait, what did you just say? And he said, yeah, we believe it’s Russians, and we think Russians are buying airtime on Spanish language radio stations. And I was,

Rachel Jones/NPF (10:33):

What year was that? Martina?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (10:34):

2002. I’m sorry, 2022. Forgive me. 2022. So it was 2022. It was just a few years ago. And I was like, this is such a huge story because the thing with Latinos are invisible unless it’s immigration, it feels like our community is just invisible to comprehensive news coverage. So the fact that this was happening and nobody knew, it was sort of astonishing to me. And I went on to continue to investigate and interview people across the country. And there was a few people who really knew that it was happening, and these were people at high levels of government, people that had been government operatives, people who’d worked in presidential administrations, people at the FCC or who were attorneys at the FC knew that this was going on. And I was like, my God. And if people were covering the Latino community the way they should be, they may have been tipped off to this much earlier.

(11:36):

So as I began to investigate the story, I realized that there was no tool that could help you monitor that. The only way to monitor Spanish language radio was to just sit there and listen for hours and hours and hours. And I remember after hours of one day, I was like, there has to be something. There has to be a way that can listen for you. I knew that there was technology for WhatsApp and misinformation around that, and I thought, there must be one. I just don’t know what it is because it’s a field that I’m not used to navigating. And I began to ask, and the more I asked, the more I realized that there wasn’t one, there wasn’t a tool to monitor radio stations. And what I ended up doing, I felt that it was so important to develop a tool that I ended up giving the series to someone else.

(12:30):

And you can find that series. It’s with RA and Feed into Worlds. It’s called Radio Frequency. And then I just set out to begin to find people that could help me build this tool. And this is an area that I knew nothing about. I didn’t know about apps, about technology, about AI and how to work with AI to develop something. This is a whole new, I’m a journalist. I mean, that’s all I felt like I’m a journalist and a former photographer, and navigating this was challenging. I didn’t know design engineers. I didn’t even know how to find a design engineer. And after six months of asking and asking and asking and asking everyone I knew flying out to California to try and meet with people because I’d been a Stanford fellow so that I knew at Stanford, there was a lot of people who are in this space to see who could point me in the right direction, but no one could.

(13:31):

And it wasn’t until I came back here to Detroit that a very well-known media outlet called Outlier tipped me off to people that they had worked with. Are you familiar with Outlier Media? Anyone? I see a couple of people shaking their heads. Outlier Media is pretty amazing. They’re here in Detroit. And I met with Candace Fortman, who is actually currently a Stanford fellow, and I just said, I’m so frustrated. I’m trying to work on this project. And she tipped me off to design engineers that they had worked with. And that was the beginning of developing Rad, a tool to help what was an extreme blind spot for journalists to be able to monitor what was happening on radio. And radio for Latinos is used at a 97 percentile. So 97% of Latinos listen to radio. That’s how much they see it as a form of cultural connection.

(14:26):

They see it as a form of getting information. And we’re a community that’s in the service industry. We are all kinds of things. We are lawyers, we are doctors, we are all of those things. But we also work in hotels, and we work in kitchens, and we work in restaurants, and we work in casinos, and we work on construction sites. And it is in those places that you’ll see, I was at a hotel in a week and a half ago, and the cleaning lady, I could hear the salsa music coming through her earphones, and I knew she was listening to the radio. And so radio was this blind spot to everyone. It was something that was just completely ignored, and no one knew how to tap into it. And it wasn’t until I met with these design engineers that I said, can this be done? Can we build this? And they said, yes, but it would cost money. And here’s all the things that we had to do in order to create it.

Rachel Jones/NPF (15:25):

Once again, another powerful demonstration of what’s at stake in that. When you think of the broad reach of the audience here, why people would invest in Misinforming and Disin inform them, fascinating to me. Why don’t we let you at this point, take us on a walk on a tour through the app and we’ll go from there?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (15:52):

Sure. Let’s see. Oh, let me make sure I have the right one. There we are. Okay, so this is the front page of Al. And so when you log on, you’ll get to this page, and then you’ll see, for example, what we did was because we were running against time, we had to get this built, or we were trying to get this built for the election. And during the election, this is all examples of mis and disinformation that pop up. And what we wanted to do was we had to get it on Battleground states. We knew that. Well, we felt that the election would be decided in those states. So we did all of this research to find all of the Latino radio stations and all the battleground states, and we uploaded, and this was just music culture talk shows, Christian radio stations, and we uploaded them all.

(16:52):

So if you go over here to the left, you can see where it says state and right, so there’s Arizona, California, Florida. In addition, we added states that had high Latino populations. These are not battleground states, Georgia is Michigan is Nevada is North Carolina, Pennsylvania, all of these are. And then after we got the Battleground states, we continued to add, we added states that had high Latino populations and a lot of radio stations. So there you see, California, New York, Texas, Wisconsin. We added all of these. So if you go, for example, let’s say we wanted to find misinformation of something happening in Florida on the radio. So you click on Florida, and then there’s a radio station that’s really well known in Florida.

It’s called Radio Mabe. So what you can do, you can go to source, and here’s all the radio stations that were uploaded.

(17:53):

There’s dozens of them. This is from across the country. We have all of these radio stations, and MBI is in Florida, the ones that we use, how scrolling, were only the Florida ones. So Rabi, they’re sort of known Disin informers. And here we have, for example, let’s see, alright, let’s see this one, it just says news. I haven’t read this before. News reports misrepresent Trump stance on the Ukraine War. So you click on it and it gives you a synopsis, it gives you a summary. It says, the claim that Trump blames zelensky for the war in Ukraine and potential World War II isn’t substantiated. So it gives you synopsis of what it is, and here is the whole piece of missed disinformation highlighted. But let’s say you don’t speak Spanish, we’re going to play it so you can hear it first.

(19:04):

Sorry, there’s something wrong with them. It’s a little slow, but normally you can hear it just fine. And that’s actually the whole clip in Spanish of the disinformation. But if you don’t speak Spanish, you go to English, click here English, and everything you see now is in English. The whole thing is translated right. It says, we need a solution to this war, and if it drags on what we have a real problem on our hands. So these are people who are disin on a talk radio show. And this was something that surprised me that the disinformation and misinformation was being spread, not by just ads, which is what was initially tipped off to me, that people were creating ads for Spanish language radio, but it was radio hosts and then people who call in. And those people were spreading disinformation. And if you’re listening to that all day and that show comes on regularly at a certain hour, people were absorbing that. Let’s go to another one.

(20:06):

So you can go back and I don’t know, we’ll just click. This is at false claims about, oh, let’s see, Putin’s invasion. It says, the speaker claims that Putin saw piece shortly after the Ukraine invasion. So here again, here’s the summary. The disinformation attempts to portray Putin as a peacemaker by claiming he sought peace three weeks after they invaded Ukraine. Again, here is the disinformation. Click here. You can see it in English. Let’s say you want to share this with someone. You have the clip. Let’s say you’re an NPR reporter. You go up here right where this download, and you can share,

(20:51):

You can share the clip of the audio, you can get the link up there. You can, excuse me. You can go to the original transcript and click on it and there’s the original transcript or you can get to the translated transcript in English, and then you can click on that. And if you want to share it, go here and you can share it. You can go to the share button, right? This is to share, and let’s say you’re working on a story about Russia and Latinos, for example, and let’s say this story. You need to bookmark this because this is going to be important for your future reporting. You can just put a star here and it’ll save it for you. And then you can click on all the star ones you have, and then it’ll show line them up for you by date and by date that they came out.

(21:47):

So this is where they’re at. Let me see. Let’s go back. So you can download the audio, you can share the transcript in Spanish and in English to help your reporting. So we’re going to go back to the main page. One of the things we realized, if you go back to the left, it says, oh, before that, let me go to labels. So when we started to upload keywords, because people asked us, how does this work? So it’s an AI tool that listens to all of these keywords. And let’s take immigration. Immigration has all of these keywords that disin informers use to disin Formm, right? Trans issues has a whole series of keywords. The war in Ukraine has a whole series of keywords. Israel Palestine has a whole series of keywords. So here, what we call them is labels. So here are all of the issues. I mean, there’s dozens of them. This is about healthcare, L-G-B-T-Q, Christianity, geopolitics, they’re Cuba, voter suppression, all of these conspiracy theories. There’s Ukraine, Russia conflict. It was, look it, you can just go on and on and on and on and on. This took us weeks to upload keywords. So once the AI hears it, it hears those keywords or key phrases, it begins to report record. Excuse me. So then it records so that we can have that clip you just heard.

(23:17):

And here, let’s say you haven’t found anything. So do you see this? Here’s a search bar. You can just, for example, if you want something on Planned Parenthood, for example, you can just put in the bar and everything will come up. It’s got a little zoom ball, so it’s a little slow right now. We have to fix that. Oh, there is Planned Parenthood. Hold on. So if you can basically put keywords into the search bar and it’ll help you narrow down anything that you’re looking for after this election, what we found was that before the election, a lot of the disinformation was to the right. It was right wing conspiracies, it was far right ideology. And after this election, what we found that there was left-leaning disinformation, and that really surprised us. We were really kind of floored by it and thought, wow, okay, so we added a left right-leaning button so that people, depending on whatever story you were working on, you could find it.

(24:26):

Let me see here. I’m trying to move this. So also what you see here is there are some, here’s the ones that are star by you. So if you wanted to go all the ones you had put a star on, you click there, start by me. And if you wanted to find ones that were stard by other people, you would go to starred by other people. There’s also, do you see this up and down button, right? We had added that after we built it because there was some, as the AI tool continued to refine itself, it’s incredibly intelligent. So when people started putting thumbs down, actually that’s not misinformation. The AI tool picks up on it and being like, okay, that’s not disinformation. Let me refine my search and make it better. And so if you are on here and you question whether it’s disinformation or not, you can put an up or down on it to sort of help the machine get better.

(25:25):

And we keep adding things so that the AI tool can refine itself and be able to more and more distinguish what disinformation is, what a conspiracy theory is, what misinformation is. Like these subtle nuances or often just conspiracy theories are outright lies. And it actually does do that. It’s gotten very, very good at conspiracy theories. Also, do you remember when we were talking about the quinceanera story? And it wasn’t a fluff cultural piece, it was a piece about economic development. It was a piece about small businesses. So here you can put tags. If you think that you’re reading something and you’re like, oh, this is missing a tag, you can actually add a tag. And again, it allows the AI tool. So we do depend on journalists to help us, and it’s because the tool is so early in its stages that it needs help from everyone to really get good at detecting this. So anybody have any questions? Okay,

Nicole Ki/MPR News  (26:28):

Yeah, I have one. Yes.

Rachel Jones/NPF (26:30):

Introduce yourself and ask your question.

Nicole Ki/MPR News  (26:33):

Yep. My name is Nicole. I’m a reporter with NPR News Radio Reporter in Minnesota. I was just wondering if you have seen more of a need for your app under the Trump administration in light of the ice raids? I know in my state, the biggest problem was that there was a lot of misinformation about the ICE raids when it was first happening, and a lot of the misinformation was coming from local radio stations. For example, local Mexican, Mexican American run radio stations were prioritizing, they were spreading information about what they knew, but it wasn’t necessarily true. Kind of instilled more fear in the immigrant population here. So just wondering what your thoughts are about that.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (27:27):

I’m sorry, I don’t know. What was the question? What’s the question?

Nicole Ki/MPR News  (27:31):

If you’re seeing more of a need for your app under the Trump administration?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (27:38):

No, I wouldn’t. So disinformation really flourished during the 2016 presidential election. That’s when we really saw what it was capable of. I mean, it actually helped decide, I mean, if any of you followed the Cambridge analytical story, they helped go deep into communities. I mean, one of the women who was the head of Cambridge Analytica, she’d worked for the Obama campaign and then went on to work for Cambridge Analytica to spread disinformation in communities. So I think that there has been a long time, I mean it’s almost 20, 24 now, eight years of constant disinformation. So I don’t know if I would say it’s more because of one president or another, but it’s definitely been around since then. And I dunno, because that only happened in November, so it’s hard to say unless you’re in the disinformation space 24 7 when it peaks and when it valleys. Hi, Leon.

Lionel Ramos/KOSU (28:56):

Yes, thank you. Can you hear me okay?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (28:59):

Yes.

Lionel Ramos/KOSU (29:00):

Okay. Yeah, I was wondering how do you add a new radio station or a new state to the app for it to start listening in? Is it one at a time, manually? And kind on that note, and you kind of touched on this, but who decides or how is it decided? What is misinformation and disinformation and kind of the partisanship aspect of it too? Is it based solely on the input of journalists as they use it, or is there initial inputs that are put in to kind of, I guess set of framework?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (29:33):

The journalists don’t input any of this. This is what’s picked up from the radio stations. So we’re recording radio stations in about 12 states, 24 hours a day. And so all the journalists do is they either can click up or down saying, yes, that’s information, or no, actually that’s not, they can maybe add a tag. But all of this information is what’s coming off the radio in states across the United States. And we add states because people ask us, we added North Carolina because people asked us to add North Carolina.

So if you live in a community, we also added languages. I mean, we realized that this wasn’t just Spanish language. So if you go up back to the left and you go to source language, we added Creole. We added Arabic because I live in Detroit next to Dearborn where the Arab community is, and with the Israel-Palestine conflict, we understood a lot of disinformation was happening. So we’ve added all kinds of languages.

Lionel Ramos/KOSU (30:38):

Just really quick follow up, when you look at that first example, right, as an example, it says false claim there. How is it determined whether it’s a false claim or a true claim or misleading? How is the AI determining that?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (30:55):

I look, I don’t know the back workings of how AI works, but I think if you click in, how many of you use ai? How many using chat GBT? None of you have used it?

Lionel Ramos/KOSU (31:07):

I don’t really use it that often. Personally, no.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (31:09):

Okay. So it’s incredibly, incredibly intelligent tool. So chat, GPT basically scours all the print, radio, Google, any kind of, it has this massive capacity to scrape information and process it incredibly quickly. So if it were to say false claims could have prevented the Ukraine war in order to make that decision, the AI tool had scraped all kinds of things on the internet and every newspaper on the internet to make that determination. And it does it at a very, very quick speed. It’s, it’s such an intelligent tool that it terrifies people.

Lionel Ramos/KOSU (31:57):

Yeah. Does it use chat GPT specifically, or does it use something that the engineers that you partnered with

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (32:02):

Chat GPT is an AI tool? I think we use an AI tool designed by Google. Okay.

Rachel Jones/NPF (32:10):

Okay. Interesting. I want to go to Richard then Elisha, then ti.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (32:15):

Okay, go ahead Richard.

Richard Sima/Washington Post (32:17):

Hi, thanks for this. I’m Richard Sima, I’m at the Washington Post.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (32:21):

Hey,

Richard Sima/Washington Post (32:22):

Yeah, I’m just curious about the up vote down vote and also the tagging is how do you protect yourself if bad actors want to brigade and try to modify your system by saying, no, none of these on our radio station for example, is

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (32:40):

We talked about that and we were like, we’re going to cross that bridge when we get to it. We just felt like at one point we did, this actually came up and we were just like, man, if there was a bad actor that was going to sift through every single one of these and start putting thumbs up or thumbs down, and we made a decision, it had to have a certain amount of thumbs up and a certain amount of thumbs down for us to either take it down or to feed it back to the AI tool. We haven’t seen anything like that yet. And I think that we thought if we see it, then we’ll address it. But we’ve seen nothing like that. I did think about the bad actors. The design engineers weren’t worried at all. I was like, you, what if they get on here? But they told me not to worry. And was there a second part?

Richard Sima/Washington Post (33:37):

No, I guess what is the contingency plan if that happens, I guess?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (33:44):

Oh, we don’t have one yet. This is three months old, so four now. It’s four months old now. So we don’t have a contingency plan. We’ve seen nothing that would allow us to determine that anything bad is happening. But I appreciate your concern, Richard. I had the same thoughts. Go ahead, Rachel, whoever you said,

Rachel Jones/NPF (34:09):

Elisha.

Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (34:13):

Hi Martina. I’m Elisha Brown. I cover reproductive rights at states newsroom based in North Carolina. Thanks so much for speaking with us today. What type of left-leaning misinformation have you seen in Verdad post-election?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (34:30):

What kind of disinformation? I encourage you people ask me that all the time. I am not able to because I’m still a reporter and I have my job at the Race I Justice reporting initiative. So I can’t be on here all the time looking for stuff, but I’ll give you just one when it comes to Planned Parenthood. This one was sent to me that I thought was fascinating. So this one, it said the speaker suggesting that Planned Parenthood’s main goal is to decrease the African American population falsely associating the organization’s founding with a racist agenda. And that is not the goal of Planned Parenthood, that is actually disinformation. And I had someone I’d met with to give them a tutorial, and this was actually her beat, like yours, reproductive rights, and she said that she had seen this starting to bubble and she felt this is like what they’re going to use to defund it, that this is going to start coming louder and louder. So you can hear right now, I’m hoping, let me see this,

(35:41):

Right, so you can hear the clip of him saying it, right, this radio show host. And so she was really floored that it had picked this up and was going to start following this because she had seen it once before and she said, I think this is starting to bubble up and I think that this is how they’re going to want to defund it. So there are instances on here of Planned Parenthood, and so you can just kind of punch it in and look up the keywords, reproductive rights, and you can do it by state if you go back and click on North Carolina and then in the keywords find reproductive rights, it’ll give you anything that that’s happening in your state, any conversation that’s happening around that.

Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (36:21):

Got it. Thank you so much. Really. One quick follow up question, would it be possible, or is the vision for it to be shopped to newsrooms like Dataminr and is it paid?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (36:36):

No, it’s free. You can all get on it. This is a tool for journalists for free, go to ra dot apps and you can all log on and make your own log on and get on there and start using it.

Elisha Brown/States Newsroom (36:50):

Okay, awesome. Thank you.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (36:52):

Yes, absolutely. And go ahead, whoever. I dunno.

Keerti Gopal/Inside Climate News (36:59):

Hi, I’m inside Climate News. Thanks for being here. I wanted to go back to the question about how the misinformation is being identified because the way I understand some of these AI tools working is like you said, it scours the web and then kind of compiles all the information that is picking up there. And so is this basically identifying information that is kind of contradicting the majority of the information that’s out there? Or how would it be picking up misinformation that maybe does have sourcing, or even if it’s false sourcing, how is it differentiating a good source from a bad source?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (37:42):

Because for example, let’s say it picked up a piece of disinformation, right? One, it doesn’t pick it up because it thinks it’s disinformation, it picks it up because it heard a keyword, so it heard the keyword that those hundreds of keywords that we input and it started to record, right? And then as it’s recording, what it then does is it creates a summary and it goes through the web to fact check whether what the person on the radio said is fact or it is considered disinformation and it will compare it to similar pieces of disinformation that have been identified as disinformation across all of these areas, across all the newspapers in the United, not one newspaper, all the newspapers in the United States. It has access to everything. It has access to global news, it has access to a global web to distinguish and compare it against that. And then it’ll determine, compare it against all of those things if it’s disinformation or not. Is it right 100% of the time? No. Is it right? The majority of the time? Yes.

Rachel Jones/NPF (39:02):

Let’s go to Monique.

Monique Welch/Houston Landing (39:05):

Yes. Hi Martina, Monique Welch, diverse communities reporter.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (39:09):

Hi,

Monique Welch/Houston Landing (39:10):

And landing. I’m going to lower my hand. My question is kind of a piggyback on QTS and Linos regarding AI and how it scrapes the internet, the global web to kind of sort out disinformation and misinformation. Does someone, so I have found that in my use of using AI mainly for reporting purposes to help save me time and polishing emails, but even in research purposes, you still kind of have to fact check it yourself in My use hasn’t always been spot on. It does give me access to a bunch of information quicker, but I still have to sort through it from there. So do you have someone that does that or how do you all kind of fact check the fact checker, if that makes sense?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (40:03):

We have a series of fact checkers. So fact checkers use this, right? And there’s a whole fact-checking team, which is this whole consortium fact-checking of a fact-checking community and they use this and they’re on it and they tell us the machine whether it’s a fact or not. But I will tell you this, I am not an AI expert. This is not why I created, I don’t know about ai. I’m not a design engineer. I mean I know a basic amount because I created this, but what this tool really does is allowed journalists and researchers and academics into a world of Spanish language radio that they were completely blind from it allowed them to pick up all of this. Look, I mean there’s hundreds of pieces of misinformation. I mean this is back in, this is the Florida one, but there’s hundreds of pieces of information that you can sift through to begin to do research or to begin to do stories.

(41:07):

Let’s say you see something, then you yourself be like, oh my God, this is fascinating. Then you would go yourself and begin to fact check whether this is true or not. You can’t rely on this as your soul as fact. I mean, you can use it and be like, I had no idea this is what was happening and this is what people are saying in this small town in Texas that everyone saying this, this is an interesting story because you can get that. You can really get narrow depending on where the radio station is and saying, this is crazy what’s happening in this small town in Texas. Everybody is saying this. This is a great story. I’m going to write about it. This is what they’re saying, and let me double check to make sure that what’s being spread on the radio is actually clear cut disinformation. But it gives you insight into all of these different states and what’s happening in different states on the radio that one normally wouldn’t have.

Rachel Jones/NPF (42:06):

Gabriela,

Gabriella Nuñez/NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (42:11):

I’m Martina Nunez here in Atlanta with our NBC affiliate. It seems like you have an incredible database thus far. What are your plans to grow this and expand this and maybe how journalists can use it in the future? I’m thinking post-Trump administration as well.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (42:28):

Disinformation is never going to go away, so don’t think that it’s going to end with the Trump administration. People have figured out a way to disin inform and to divide American communities, and it’s really an insurmountable task that is a huge burden on fact checkers and people monitoring disinformation in the United States because what we’re up against is huge. We’re up against foreign governments who are trying to inform Americans. So I don’t think it’s going to end with the Trump administration. And as for the plans, we are already in a phase two where we’re adding a trending button. So there’s going to be a button over here to the right in the way that X has trending tweets, we’re going to have trending disinformation. What’s the top 1, 2, 3, disinformation, and do it by state. That’s one, right? And then we have to continue to advance the capabilities of the tool itself so that it continues to get better and better and better. And what we’ve been doing is we’ve actually been finding really good examples of recorded disinformation, feed it back to the eight I tool, and then it’s like, oh, that’s a clear cut piece of disinformation. Then it uploads it to its own system and it gets better. You asked me another component. What was it? It was what’s next?

Gabriella Nuñez/NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (43:51):

How do you hope journalists continue to use this tool?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (43:56):

I hope they use it to create stories. I hope you guys use it to be like for me, I mean I find it fascinating as a journalist to write stories and to be able to see what’s happening in my community, like the North Carolina folks. That was the one thing. I lived in North Carolina for three years and I was always shocked at how, especially if you were at the news and observer, how little they wrote about the Latino community comprehensively. And if you’re doing a story you could easily write about, let’s say abortion and the Latino community in search in the tool to see if there’s anything interesting that you don’t know about. There may be something on the other part of the state that’s being spread and you can actually write a story about it.

Gabriella Nuñez/NBC Atlanta 11Alive News (44:53):

Thank you.

Anjali Huynh/Boston Globe (44:55):

Hi Martina. I’m with the Boston Globe. I cover politics there. Thanks so much for doing this. Absolutely. I’m curious what you’ve made of the coverage so far of immigration and Latino communities so far in the weeks since Trump took office particularly as compared to what it looked like during his first term. And are there any particular storylines that you think need to be pushed back on because they’re overgeneralizing or harmful, et cetera at this point?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (45:28):

No, I mean, I don’t think it’s any different than his first. I don’t think it’s that different from his first administration. I think it was much more horrible during his first administration because they were separating infants from their mothers and we were really sort of had an open view to what the administration was willing to do in order to instill fear in immigrants so that they wouldn’t cross. And I think that they’re doing the same thing. It seems that with this administration, the cruelty is the point, the fear is the point. They want to shock people to not think about crossing and to send people back. So I don’t know if I can say I’m not an immigration reporter per se, so I don’t observe it in a way an immigration reporter would, but I can’t think of anything that has stood out to me that’s that different.

And I think the people who are covering what’s happening in Guantanamo, what’s happening in these camps, I think they’re very good journalists covering what’s going on. The Guantanamo is particularly disturbing because once you’re there, you have no rights. So sorry I couldn’t offer more, but I’m not an immigration reporter.

Rachel Jones/NPF (46:51):

Daniella,

Daniela Doncel/Connecticut Public (46:54):

Hi. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Daniella Donel, I’m the Latino communities reporter with Connecticut Public Radio.

(47:01):

Yes. And I was curious to hearing you talk about how you are a daughter of immigrants and how you wanted to cover your community. I find myself very much in the same boat. A lot of my be right now is immigration, and I’m kind of curious to hear your thoughts on how you balance covering these really impactful and disheartening stories really that can very much mirror our own personal experiences and your mental health and how you balance those two things, especially because these kinds of topics can be a lot and so I’m kind of curious how you handle that.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (47:41):

Okay, two things emotionally, I definitely find that I have to take care and that it affects me. I am sort of like one degree away always from someone I know, whose brother, whose cousin, who somebody that got taken away and how traumatic it is for that family and how it does impact me. So I have to take space, I have to care for myself and I have to say, I know this is impacting me. Different people do different things. People go for runs, people go to the gym People. For me, sometimes times, honestly, watching a movie, I find this form of escapism for a few hours takes me sort of away from it. Whatever it is that you do, do it because it does have an impact. The other thing I also love in reporting the community, people have like, well, they’re like, well, what else is there if it’s not immigration as though that’s all we are.

(48:49):

And I’ve really had a lot of fun doing a lot of business stories and that kind of really lifts me up to do that and to really be able to work with the local Chamber of commerce and get facts and figures and get numbers and compare that to national statistics and doing economic development and business stories really make me feel like this is what this community that you ignore is contributing economically to the city and to the state. This is how many women are opening small businesses. This is how many businesses total have opened. These are their economic contributions. And so doing stories and sometimes really unique ones. I met a young girl and I’ll tell you I love this story. I met two young ladies. One was a pastry chef and one was a Mexican Panera. She’s the granddaughter of Mexican bakers and on both sides of their families, their grandparents and their parents baked. But here were these young women in their twenties who were making pastries. There was for you who don’t understand, I hope you know what mole is, it’s a very savory Mexican dish and she made a sweet bread out of mole. This was really creative. So the other one was taking all of these traditional recipes and making these this ve fancy pastry on Oz conche.

(50:17):

I did a story on them about how these two young bakers were following in their family’s traditions, but sort of flipping all these Mexican breads and pastries on their heads and how they had opened up their small businesses. So you can do things like that and they really, they make me feel good and make me feel excited about the community while balancing out some of the horrors of immigration. So both of those things, covering the community comprehensively and taking time for yourself.

Daniela Doncel/Connecticut Public (50:49):

Thank you so much.

Rachel Jones/NPF (50:52):

I wanted to see who we have. Are there any other questions? If not, I think we have reached unfortunately the end of our time because I’m reminded of how much I enjoyed getting to know you in that initial conversation. But I want to piggyback on something that actually Boris Sanchez talked about during his session at a widening opening training, and that is something I’m hearing from a lot of people actually. The opportunity of reporting on this moment in our nation’s history and on the turbulence in media, and I want you to sort of connect us and take us out of this conversation by helping the fellows understand not only the importance obviously of reporting and identifying misinformation, but the opportunity to add value to communities, to their own expertise, to media in general. What would you say about accepting the challenge of reporting on Miss and disinformation?

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (52:06):

Take it. You guys are living and being reporters in an incredibly historic time. The entire global geopolitical landscape, basically the laws that have governed the globe for the last 70 years are changing in real time and they affect the communities you serve and they’re going to collect sort of the global power structure. Never have journalists in America been under threat the way they are now. You are in a moment of history and of being a journalist that is so unique that I would dig my heels in and get deeper, go deeper, this may change, but the moment you’re living in, I would go all in and don’t be a desk reporter. Get out into the communities as much as you can. When I was trained, it was like they would be like, what are you doing here if you’re not filing a story? They wanted me out in the communities to build my Rolodex of sources, to get to know who the people, the church leaders were, the community leaders who were the up and coming leaders, who were the social media influencers.

(53:27):

Get to know everyone and be at your desk as little as possible, the more you’re in the community. That was what saved me so many times. I was always in the Arab community when I was a community reporter at the NPR station here, and I loved covering the Arab community and I was in coffee shops, meeting with individuals, have coffee hours. I have a young journalist I’m mentoring because she’s called it Cafe Cheese Coffee and Gossip, and she sends her calendar, she puts it out on her Facebook and twice a week, every week for three hours, she has someone in her calendar who’s set up to talk to her and wants to tell them about what’s happening in their community. From their perspective. It’s been super successful for her, and so do things like that be innovative. This is a fascinating time in history. I think if you’ve been following what’s happening with Ukraine, our alliances are changing. Dig in as much as you can. It’s really a wild ride. Enjoy every second of it.

Rachel Jones/NPF (54:32):

I’m going to ask you to unshare your screen because your words are so powerful. I want the full effect. Martina Guzman, this has been such an informative and powerful session for me, and I’m sure I speak for the fellows in saying that as well. So I’d like to thank you so much for joining us. You are now officially a part of the Widening family and we will be bugging you quite often. I

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (55:02):

Can’t wait.

Rachel Jones/NPF (55:03):

If you don’t mind

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (55:03):

Anyone if get my email from Rachel and don’t hesitate to hit me up. Send me an email. I’ve mentored all kinds of people. I’m happy if I can with any way I can to support you. I mean, if you have a question about ADA or you’re trying to figure something out, shoot me an email

Rachel Jones/NPF (55:21):

And we will. Martina Gilman, thank you so much for joining. Widening the Pipeline.

Martina Guzmán/Planet Detroit (55:27):

Thank you everyone. Bye-bye.

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