Sarah Pineda

Sarah Pineda is a community engagement journalist working on building trust, deepening relationships and identifying opportunities for content through engagement strategies for non-profit newsrooms. She is currently the Community Engagement Editor at Prism Reports — an independent, non-profit newsroom ran by women of color. Sarah is passionate about uplifting the stories and voices from communities of color and young folks.

During her free time, you can find Sarah eating a churro at Disneyland, traveling with her family and friends, or binge-watching The Office.

portfolio

A U D I E N C E E N G A G E M E N T

Prism reports

• After analyzing the success of book recommendation content on Prismreports.org, I pitched an engagement-driven story asking readers to share their favorite Black artist or writer for Black History Month. Responses from both our audience and staff, contributed to this roundup piece.

KQED arts & culture

• At the beginning of 2021, I was scrolling through KQED Arts’ social feeds listening and reading how discouraged and unmotivated our community felt going into the new year still in a pandemic. I wanted to help uplift the community, so I commissioned artists to create artwork for our Instagram page around a central theme of reimagining what the future could look like post-pandemic. Read my web post on the project here.

• Identifying engagement opportunities on new emerging platforms is important in audience building. When Instagram Reels released, I quickly began creating content because I knew Instagram would be boosting these short-form videos. I created a new short-form video series for our Rebel Girls Bay Area Women History series on both Instagram Reels and TikTok, bringing in a new audience.

• Collaborating with designers is helpful when producing visually appealing content that can be easily identified as your brand. I partnered with the KQED Design team to help create new social graphics we could use that would help brand our Rightnowish the podcast episodes across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Like this one.

• For National Poetry Month, I was approached by the producers of KQED’s radio show Forum, to create a callout asking local, emerging poets to submit their original poems to play on air. I got over 100 submissions and had folks begging us to make this an annual thing. Read the roundup here.

southern california public radio (kpcc, kpcc in person and laist)

During my time at SCPR, I assisted the audience development team in producing social copy that promoted our queries and events. I also worked alongside the KPCC In Person team producing social content on Instagram for our live, storytelling show called Unheard LA.

e n g a g e d j o u r n a l i s m

I helped with the behind-the-scenes engagement for former KPCC reporter Priska Neely’s reporting on Black infant mortality. In order to bring the reporting to folks who needed it the most, I bundled and mailed 6,000 informational postcards to residents in predominantly Black neighborhoods with high rates of infant mortality. I also helped build a database of community partners and assist two panel events with fellow experts in the field for Black mothers. Read about the project here.

I have spearheaded over seven public, online call-outs for KQED Arts & Culture. Six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I partnered with the Arts’ editorial team to hear from our artist community how the pandemic has affected them and their creative practice. Our Arts editor wrote a piece including some of the artists’ stories.

A year later, I wanted to check-in with these same artists to hear what’s changed for them. I believed it was important for our audience to guide the storytelling of how they experienced their first year in a pandemic. Our editorial team followed up with a few artists to create this roundup post. The average time spent on the web post is 3:44 minutes, showing how I successfully created off-platform-driven content informed by our readers.

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