In February, seasoned immigration and border reporter Alfredo Corchado took on a new challenge: covering his home.

Corchado, a native of El Paso, Texas, is now the executive editor of the Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit journalism initiative funded by the El Paso Community Foundation to report (and fund reporting) on both sides of the 1,954-mile border that separates Mexico and the United States. Its current publishing partners include local TV stations KVIA ABC 7 and Univision 26, El Paso Inc., the Gannett-owned El Paso Times, and NPR’s KTEP El Paso.

“Puente” means bridge in Spanish. The goal of the collaborative is to bolster the coverage of communities on both sides of the border, and report on border stories “beyond the border,” Corchado said. A 2022 study from the Center for Community Media found that there are 70 news outlets based on the U.S side of the border. But at least 30 counties on either side of the border don’t have any active news sources, according to some preliminary research by Puente.

Corchado started working on Puente while covering two historic elections: Leftist candidate Claudia Sheinbaum was elected as Mexico’s first female president in June, while the U.S. presidential race between former president Donald Trump and current vice president Kamala Harris will be decided in November. Some stories include the findings from a Puente-commissioned poll about Mexico’s election; Ecuador turning away Chinese migrants who come through the country in order to get to the U.S.; and an investigation into Mexican cartels that provide a “VIP” package to migrants to cross the border through sewers.

So far Puente’s reporting has been picked up by USA Today, the El Paso Times, Texas Observer, NAHJ’s Palabra, El Paso Matters, KTEP, and the San Antonio Express-News.

The Puente News Collaborative first launched in 2021 with grant funding from Microsoft and convened eight local news outlets in El Paso and Juárez to report on the sister cities. When Microsoft’s funding ended last year, the El Paso Community Foundation reached out to Corchado to lead the collaborative’s expansion and to Deborah Zuloaga, a 30-year veteran of the United Way of El Paso, to work on fundraising. Puente accepts individual donations, but it’s also looking to secure funding from local border foundations, as well as from national foundations.

There’s been some upheaval among the outlets involved in the 2021 iteration of Puente. La Verdad Juárez left the collaboration in June, saying “the project was no longer in the hands of those of us who do journalism, of the partners who created and worked on the initiative since 2021,” cofounders Rocío Gallegos and Gabriela Minjares told me via email.

EPCF CEO Eric Pearson said “the Puente News Collaborative did not change its mission, but it did expand its reach beyond the local pilot that the El Paso Community Foundation originated only in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.”

Corchado, a 2009 Nieman Fellow, has covered Mexico, the border, and immigration for more than 35 years. When he took a buyout from the Dallas Morning News in 2023, he felt he still had more stories to tell.

“I saw firsthand the impact of misinformation and disinformation on the border,” Corchado said. “A lot of us on the border still have PTSD, especially in El Paso, [from] when a gunman from North Texas [came] down and tried to stop the ‘Hispanic invasion’ of Texas. As a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, that really hit me hard. We are his local newspaper. All these stories we’re doing about immigration, the wall — did that play a role in this person’s decision to come and tragically end the lives of 23 people? It wasn’t just El Paso. I think many Mexican-American communities along the border were similarly impacted.”

“There was a part of me that felt kind of guilty, like, who’s going to cover the border?” he added. “I saw [Puente] as a calling to do this and to connect with competitors and colleagues.”

Corchado doesn’t want to just focus on immigration policy. Over the summer, he visited Milwaukee and Chicago this summer to report on the border’s impact on the Midwestern economy and what happens to migrants after they cross into the United States. The collaborative has commissioned researchers at the University of Texas, El Paso to study news consumption patterns and interests of border residents.

He also wants to explore unique cultural stories, like wine production in the Mexican desert state of Chihuahua, a long-weekend gathering of Texas and Ohio hunters on the border, and the influx of Americans moving to Mexico. He’s been talking to journalists from all over the border — many of whom cross it frequently — to learn about their communities’ coverage needs and which stories they think are missing. Once election season is over, he plans to take a road trip, driving the entire length of the border to see it up close and report along the way.

“If you look beyond the wall, you really see these two vibrant communities that are involved in each other’s lives and the integration between them,” Corchado said. “It’s much more than bullets, and much more than migration.”