Felipe Recondo followed shifting news habits beyond print, turning Supreme Court coverage into newsletters, podcasts and YouTube.
Over the past 20 years, Brazil’s highest court, the Supreme Federal Court, has gone from a supporting role to a leading actor in the country’s political arena. With this shift, reporters also had to reinvent themselves. One of the journalists who has best reported on this transition is Felipe Recondo.
A graduate of the University of Brasília, Recondo began his career as the court began to undergo its transformation. Recondo, now 47, along with colleagues including Rodrigo Haidar, Felipe Seligman, Laura Diniz, Bárbara Pombo, Rafael Baliardo and Luís Orlando Carneiro, co-founded in 2014 the news outlet JOTA, which specializes in legal journalism. Last year, he left after more than a decade growing the organization from scratch.
“They were intense years of continuous learning, in which I had the opportunity to closely follow important transformations in the country,” he wrote in a social media post. “This journey resulted in three books, academic research and oral history projects that made me grow more than I could have imagined — and that continue to motivate me.”
As part of LatAm Journalism Review’s (LJR) Five Questions series, Recondo spoke about why covering Brazil’s highest court still drives him, what keeps drawing him to niche journalism ventures, and how reporters should navigate the country’s increasingly polarized presidential race. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The perception that it is possible to build other paths to produce information. When I advocated, at the beginning of JOTA, for a business model based on direct exchange with subscribers, it seemed something different, inappropriate, questionable. To me, it did not. I insisted on this idea and, fortunately, we moved toward this model, which proved suitable for our reality and for the demand for quality information in a country where legal uncertainty requires specialized journalism. There are other possible paths, other areas to explore. These 11 years, therefore, have opened my mind to so many other possibilities.
JOTA was my second company. Before that, I had already built, with other partners, TORRE, focused on communication strategy in judicial and regulatory proceedings. Now I have launched Zarabatana. New projects will be developed in the field of academic research, history and video production, also opening paths for initiatives related to communication in judicial proceedings.
In addition, I continue writing — with a weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court on Substack — and I created two YouTube channels to talk about the Supreme Court (Recondo and Os Onze), as well as a channel dedicated to the podcast Sem Precedentes. In short, there were many paths waiting to be explored, and it was time to follow them.
When I started covering the Supreme Court, there were already journalists who had been there for years, providing technical coverage—coverage, however, that seemed to interest newspapers only at sporadic moments. Those reporters — that was my impression — were considered very specialized, even niche. Journalists who did not cover the court thought they held knowledge that was difficult to grasp. It was as if it were quantum physics, perhaps because of the language, the legal jargon and because the judicial process has its own specificities.
At that time, the court did not receive much attention from the public. That began to change precisely during that period, with decisions that started to attract greater public interest and for which the newspaper — O Estado de S. Paulo — gave a lot of space. From short notes, articles about some specific cases, or at most special coverage of a major trial, we moved to daily coverage of the Court. Coverage in which a justice’s statement could become a newspaper headline, in which journalists began to report on every procedural movement of a case.
The Supreme Court press corps previously had fewer than a dozen reporters. Today there are dozens and dozens of accredited journalists. This has effects on the perception of the court, changes the way we see news about it and conveys to readers a different image of the Supreme Court. And I say this considering only the shift stemming from media coverage. We could also discuss the Court's own responsibility for this new reality—for the public's growing curiosity about the Court, and for its overexposure.
The same work as always, the same care, the same pursuit of equidistance, balance and objectivity — but without giving up the role of explaining and critiquing. Objectivity cannot be confused with the mere uncritical publication of statements by one or another politician.
This work will certainly be criticized on social media by those who support candidates on one side or the other, but media organizations have their role and should not give it up.
It was already a reality that news consumers were migrating to other ways of consuming information. And audiovisual formats were growing exponentially. A new audience, with high engagement, was in this space. It was necessary to explore it. The website was an essential tool, but insufficient. I then began talking about the Supreme Court, writing scripts and trying to tell the story of the court — or analyze the week’s rulings — for a broader audience that was on podcasts and YouTube.
And it worked so well that I decided to create, with two partners, a company dedicated exclusively to this — Zarabatana Studio.
Producing audio and video content independently opens the door to another type of audience, other formats and another language to explain the same facts and phenomena. Just as I had never thought about writing books about the Supreme Court, I had also never imagined writing scripts to explain it. Today, I think this is a very promising path.
This is a very interesting question because it takes me back to when I started covering the Supreme Court, coming from covering politics. The first thing I did was try to understand what kind of institution it was, what made it different and how its decision-making process worked. Covering the courts without understanding this is like hitting the road without a map or navigation tool.
Trying to explain the Supreme Court as if it functioned like politics is a mistake, because the judiciary operates differently, the actors relate in distinct ways and justify their decisions based on other values. Therefore, I think that to cover the courts, it’s necessary to make an initial effort to understand it, and then continuously work on translating and explaining it.
