Stories about açaí bowls in East L.A., reporting on ICE raids and quinceañeras. Covering pupusas and stand-up comedy. Breaking down taxes on cannabis. Exploring $20 matcha and what it says about a changing city.
While immersing themselves in Los Angeles’ neighborhoods and cultures, students like Lizbeth Solorzano are learning how to take deeply reported, community-centered journalism and translate it into content that audiences engage with, trust and share.
Increasingly, this means thinking like a journalist and a creator.
“I think this is a more authentic approach when it comes to building credibility and informing the public,” said Solorzano, a specialized journalism master’s student. “This could be part of the new wave of journalism for the industry to adapt to and survive.”
Through what professors Amara Aguilar and Javier Cabral dub a ‘hybrid’ approach, students in their JOUR 499 course produce well-developed text articles alongside creator-style videos. The two pieces build off of each other, but can still be distributed independently.
To co-teach the class, Aguilar tapped Cabral, editor-in-chief of L.A. TACO, an independent news organization that began as a lifestyle blog in 2006, evolved into an award-winning food journalism outlet and is now expanding into investigative reporting. Their newsroom is rooted in what Cabral calls “street-level, unapologetically L.A., zero gatekeeping, and always on the side of the people who actually live here.”
Together with their students, Aguilar and Cabral are exploring how the influencer-style community journalism practiced by L.A. TACO’s team can be taught and practiced, and why understanding the balance is vital to the future of news.
A class born from how people actually consume news
“So many people, including myself, are following content creators for information, issues and communities they care about,” Aguilar said.
The Reuters 2025 Digital News Report identified this as a major trend, noting that audiences are increasingly turning to social media and video platforms for news, weakening the reach of traditional outlets and accelerating a more fragmented ecosystem of creators.
That shift, she said, became the foundation of the course.
Aguilar and Cabral want to train students to operate in a hybrid media ecosystem where credibility and connection coexist.
They are careful not to choose sides.
“I force them to collaborate—traditional writers paired with creators, influencers learning how to source properly, journalists learning how to actually reach an audience instead of just preaching to one,” Cabral said.
By the end of the semester, perspectives begin to change.
“They start realizing we’re all fighting the same dying industry,” Cabral added. “The future isn’t picking a side. It’s stealing the best from both.”
For Solorzano, that approach has reshaped how she sees the profession.
“My understanding of what it means to be a journalist hasn’t changed, but my assumption of what a journalist looks like, has,” she said.
“When it came to creating the hybrid-reporting videos, that made me realize that journalists don’t have to be so formal all the time, and we can have our own online personalities that feel personable.”
Learning accountability in a creator-driven world
While embracing platform-driven storytelling, both Aguilar and Cabral emphasize that the course remains laser-focused on journalism’s core responsibility: accountability to communities.
“The stories students pitched and produced have to follow L.A. TACO’s standards,” Aguilar said.
That means real assignments and real rejection.
“We treat the classroom like the newsroom,” Cabral said, “I bring in our actual team. I make students pitch in the same brutal way we do every week. That’s street-level journalism in practice: urgency, accountability to the community, and zero tolerance for lazy work.”
It also means getting out of the classroom and into Los Angeles.
“I make them leave campus and actually go into neighborhoods instead of just reading about them,” Cabral said. “We spend class time breaking down how to report without being extractive, how to build real relationships, and how to write like you’re talking to your friend at a bar or restaurant, not some imaginary editor in New York.”
“We work with students on scripts, discuss their presence on camera, keeping it conversational, but also focus on transparency and accuracy,” Aguilar added.
This all crystallized for Solorzano while reporting on Día de los Muertos celebrations.
“I wanted the story to highlight the strength and resilience of Latines in Los Angeles, but I couldn’t insert my strong feelings or my opinions into it to stay objective,” said Solorzano, who serves as editor of Dímelo, Annenberg Media’s Latine news desk.
“So, I let the community members speak for me and themselves in order to tell that story.”
Getting ready for what comes next
Aguilar and Cabral said their aim is to prepare students for the realities of modern media: building platforms, navigating legal risks and earning trust in public-facing work.
“I feel both more empowered and cautious when it comes to building a media platform,” Solorzano said.
And if she were to launch one?
“I would definitely emphasize my authenticity…. If I can keep it real, people will want to hear what I have to say and what I report.”
Aguilar and Cabral said Solorzano and her fellow JOUR 499 students also taught them a thing or two about what the future of journalism might look like.
“These young adults move differently,” Cabral said. “They taught me that the attention economy is even more brutal than I thought, and that if you don’t speak their language — visually, sonically, emotionally — you’re invisible.”
Cabral’s biggest takeaway: don’t get stuck in “back in my day” nostalgia.
“They’re hungrier, more multilingual and more culturally fluent than we were at their age,” he said. “They basically challenged me to think that the next 20 years of L.A. TACO can’t look like the last 20. And they’re right. I’m listening.”
Aguilar is seeing that shift in how students understand the role itself.
“One of the assignments students work on early in the course is interviewing an influencer or content creator and a journalist,” she said. “This reveals insights about roles, goals, ethics, trust and how perspectives are changing.”
She added that students “know content creator skills are invaluable especially now… as they continue building their careers as trusted storytellers.”