The scene looks familiar to any journalist: a reporter, a camera operator, a microphone and two people being interviewed. The story is about urban violence, an indispensable beat and constant concern for residents of Rio de Janeiro.
It all points to a typical TV news setup, but in reality this is a local neighborhood news page called Zona Sul Urgente (Southern Zone Urgent), an Instagram profile initially created to gather information about issues local to one of the most touristic areas of the city.
From traffic accidents and interviews to service journalism and local breaking news alerts, just about anything fit for publication makes it onto the page, sometimes with censored images to avoid Instagram restrictions regarding violence.
Created in 2022 by a doorman and camera operator named Leonardo, and taken over by journalist and friend Diego Bino, who now holds the microphone and presents the news, the page has almost 380,000 followers and 43 million views per month, data that was shown to LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
It runs alongside another highly popular account called Alerta Rio, which focuses more on urban violence and threats reported by residents across the city.
“Before the pandemic I created a page called Alerta Zona Sul by myself. It reached 60,000 followers, I started getting a lot of demand and people even began seeing me as some sort of representative from City Hall,” Leonardo told LJR.
He asked to be identified only by his first name due to threats he’s received from suspected criminals in response to his videos.
Managing the page came with so much stress that Leonardo sold the page in 2022 to a representative of a local politician aligned with the mayor of Rio de Janeiro.
“I didn’t even think about monetizing the page. So the only money I made from it was just from selling it. There was no sponsorship, there was nothing. So what happened? I became depressed because I really liked posting news. Then a month later I created even more pages, including Alerta Rio and Zona Sul Urgente,” he said.
Bino, meanwhile, had just arrived in Rio de Janeiro in December 2022 from his home state of Ceará after years of being a local journalist at a city radio station that was owned by the mayor.
“Back in my city, I was hosting a program called ‘O Varjotense’ in the morning and in the afternoon I was reporting to the radio program ‘Tribuna do Povo’ with Hélio Soares, a well-known broadcaster in the northwest region of Ceará. That’s when I started to give people a voice,” Bino told LJR, explaining that at that time, he created an Instagram page named after the program he hosted.
“So when I recorded a report and wanted to show more details to the public, I would announce it on the radio and ask people to check the stories on O Varjotense. I had about 20,000 followers there.” The city has about 18,000 residents.
Bino said he became increasingly disillusioned with the response he was getting after he exposed issues connected to those in power.
“When I showed the bad things that were happening on the opposition side, many people applauded,” he said. ”But when I started showing the bad things on the ruling side, some people turned against me as well, and I never bowed my head to politicians, because I do all of this with good intentions and a sense of purpose in life. And that’s when I decided to go back to Rio de Janeiro.”
In Rio, a city he had known and worked in for years before going to his native Ceará, Bino started publishing local reports on his personal Instagram profile and tagged Zona Sul Urgente, owned by Leonardo. Eventually they met and a duo was formed.
“I said: Let’s partner up, I’ll be the face, I’ll interview people, I’ll give a voice to the residents. I’ll do what I was already doing back in Ceará, and from there we’ll join forces, because I was on my own and he was on his own, too,” Bino said. Leonardo invited him to manage Alerta Rio.
“At the time, Alerta Rio had 90,000 followers, so he [Leonardo] would handle the Zona Sul Urgente and I would handle Alerta Rio,” Bino said. “And then I started putting my face on Alerta Rio, which was very risky, right? Because Alerta Rio is more hard news.”
After receiving threats by local drug gangs who knew he was a journalist, Bino moved out of the favela where he lived, publicly distanced himself from Alerta Rio, and focused more on Zona Sul Urgente, which leans toward public service journalism and tips submitted by the community.
The impact these pages have is so far-reaching that Bino said many TV producers from traditional media follow them for story ideas, and also turn to him whenever they need the assistance of a colleague.
“I reach out to him often, and he always comes to my aid,” Rodrigo Monteiro, local reporter at CNN Brasil, told LJR. “Whenever I need some material that I know might be on his page or that he got from some other source, he goes out of his way to help.”
For scholars and researchers what Bino and Leo are doing is a symptom of the traditional press losing its connection with the population.
“Some journalists — or sometimes even non-journalists — have identified a demand for a certain type of information or service and start offering it on social media”, Murillo Camarotto, a researcher at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, told LJR.
“Depending on the content, they are able to gain traction and an audience. There are already several other similar profiles in other parts of Brazil that are, in fact, managing to build a more loyal audience—one that previously belonged to traditional newspapers,” he said.
Despite strong popular support online and on the streets, largely due to the practical service these pages provide, there are concerns. Scholars view the practice of publishing community alerts—which consist mostly of security camera footage depicting crimes with uncensored faces—as editorially concerning, given that they constitute evidence that has neither been verified nor investigated by the police.
In Rio, where punitive attitudes and vigilantism are real issues, that can be especially problematic.
Jacqueline Deolindo, professor at Universidade Federal Fluminense told LJR that social media companies have helped foster the rise of these initiatives because producing news — especially when done in a careful, ethical and thorough way — is expensive.
“In other cases, [these initiatives are] fully aligned with the logic of large corporations and algorithms, to guarantee reach and visibility, which is dangerous as it increases the potential circulation of disinformation through poorly verified, misleading or inaccurate news, or by giving space to what may even become subject to legal action, such as the exposure of people, data or support for practices that go against the Democratic Rule of Law, harming not only journalistic ethics but also the highest human values,” she said.
Bino told LJR that they only post within certain conditions.
“It is essential to clarify that uncensored videos are not published irresponsibly. This type of content is released only when the facts are properly verified and constitute a crime in the act,” Bino said, adding that, to him, the exposure in these situations is not sensationalist, but informative and of public utility, contributing to the identification of suspects and raising public awareness.
“When we publish footage of a criminal breaking into a store without blurring their face, we are able to identify the suspect; the authorities then act swiftly, arresting the offender and providing a response to society,” he said.
