MillenniumBeat.com was founded by a group of journalism students at the University of Miami School of Communication in the spring 2009 to bring to light underreported topics. These pioneering news gatherers will work together as “beat reporters” to provide in depth coverage of various immigrant communities.
These reporters will initially explore stories around Miami, a city that transcends national borders and has a unique sociological structure reflective of a cultural and economic interconnectivity present in today’s global era. According to the 2007 census, immigrants make up over half of the city’s approximate population of 2.3 million people. Over the past 50 years, the Latin American population in Miami has increased from 5 percent to 62 percent.
Miami is continually evolving as a “world” city consistent with what sociologist Alejandro Portes calls “global villages” and “transnational communities,” where today’s immigrants maintain strong ties to their home countries. But these communities are also segmented and tend to preserve a civic culture unique to their specific ethnic group, often maintaining a sense of nationalism toward their countries of origin.
The first stories will focus on Brazilians, Cuban Jews, Haitians and Venezuelans. The reporters’ mission is to investigate and cover these communities’ news as they relate to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which aim to rehabilitate the world’s most impoverished countries both socially and economically. Stories will examine how issues such as environment, gender, health, education and poverty have deeply affected the lives of these immigrants in areas throughout South Florida and abroad.
The Millennium Beat’s ultimate goal is to bring attention to the news relevance of the MDGs and incorporate them as a mainstream “news value,” the criteria used to determine the “newsworthiness,” or prominence of a story in the media.
All news stories are supplemented with new media elements, such as video clips, audio clips and photo slideshows, demonstrating the narrowing divide between journalistic reporting and multimedia and the emergence of “New Media Reporting.”
By Dena Giannini, Web Editor
For more information about Millennium Beat, please contact Chris Delboni (305-284-5964) at the Knight Center for International Media at the School of Communication, University of Miami
