During this year’s United Nations climate talks in northern Brazil, some news outlets briefly reported on a peripheral yet controversial issue: the price of food during the event.
With some 56,000 registered attendees in Belén, a city in the middle of the Amazon rainforest that rarely sees such a surge of visitors, food prices were expected to rise above Brazil’s national averages. But to many local reporters, the coverage from visiting journalists seemed disrespectful.
Mary Tupiassu, a reporter from Amazônia no Ar, an independent outlet that covers the region, complained that during the first day of the event, one of the most discussed topics was the price of a snack.
“It was biased, prejudiced, and xenophobic,” Tupiassu told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “When these journalists choose to focus on that, they don’t take into account either the Amazon logistical issues nor that these high prices also occur in other COPs.”
Countering seemingly trivial storylines, independent newsrooms from across Brazil formed collaborative teams to share resources and deliver nuanced coverage of both the negotiations and a region that remains largely overlooked even by many Brazilians.
Those efforts coalesced into groups including the House of Socio-Environmental Journalism, a collaboration and physical space at the conference; Midia Indígena, a coalition of Indigenous Journalists from all parts of Brazil ; and Mídia Ninja, a 12-year-old collaborative distribution network.
At the House of Socio-Environmental Journalism, journalists from 21 outlets shared content, live streamed events and translated many of their stories into Spanish and English.
“This is an unprecedented effort,” Stefano Wrobleski, executive director of InfoAmazonia, told LJR. “No one has ever done anything like this before."
Activists and social movements from various parts of the world gathered on Nov. 15, 2025, for the Global Climate March in Belém. (Photo: Courtesy Mídia Ninja)
Reporter Steffanie Schmidt from O Varadouro, a non-profit in the amazonian state of Acre, said the collaboration with the House of Socio-Environmental Journalism allowed her and her colleagues to focus on their strengths.
“I would be lost if I had to cover the negotiations part of the conference,” she told LJR.
She said the collaborating outlets weren’t competing, but the opposite: “We complement each other.”
Their material is freely available via Rede Cidadã, or Citizen Network in English, a coalition of outlets based in the Brazilian Amazon that cover socio-environmental issues.
Another collaborative project came from Mídia Ninja, which was founded in 2013 with an alternative model centered around broadcasting live events from the streets with a "no cuts, no censorship" motto.
According to Raissa Galvão, editor and coverage coordinator, Midia Ninja has covered conferences since the United Nations climate conference in 2021 in Glasgow. Galvão said the project this year worked with almost 300 content creators in text, design and photography and that the majority of them were from host city Belém.
The project aimed to point out cases of greenwashing at the conferences, which are often coopted by large oil, mining or cattle ranching companies, Galvão said.
“We observed a narrative that tried to criminalize Belém and change the focal points from the negotiations, the climate issues and the paths forward to a discussion about rent, snacks and irrelevant things,” Galvão told LJR. “Our editorial line is to bring up the issue of climate justice and the perspective of the peoples and communities affected by this crisis.”
Mika Saulo, a 26-year-old Belém reporter who collaborated with Midia Ninja, used the conference to highlight the contrast between political speeches and the realities of communities facing the daily impacts of climate change. In a video shared on Midia Ninja’s platforms, Saulo showed residents walking and vehicles driving through flooded streets in one of Belém’s most neglected neighborhoods. The video got more than 55,000 likes.
“Even in the national press, there is a distant and sometimes shallow view of who we are,” Saulo told LJR. “When journalists from different places arrive here, experience life here, interact with locals, and produce content together, it breaks down many preconceived notions.”
Indigenous media outlets also chose the cooperation models as it helps a diverse body of journalists and communicators from different backgrounds gather in a focused effort to cover topics such as land demarcations and threats to their communities and ways of life.
“This cooperation is necessary because of how hard it is to cover COP,” Grazy Kaimbé, 23, a journalist at Mídia Indígena, one of the few Indigenous-focused media outlets in Brazil, told LJR. They hosted 25 native Brazilian journalists at Casa Maraká.
“Traditional media often does not consider the Indigenous perspective,” she said. “So this collaboration was for that: it served to expand the voice of Indigenous peoples from different biomes to all corners of Brazil and the world.”
