When it came time for Mexican journalist Paola Torres and her colleagues to present the podcast episode “Tlaxcala: El despertar de los guardianes del bosque” (Tlaxcala: The awakening of the guardians of the forest), they could not have imagined the reaction it would provoke.
Among the audience were members of the community in San Pedro Tlalcuapan, as well as defenders of the forests surrounding the inactive volcano La Malinche – also known as Malintzin – located in the state of Tlaxcala.
In the heat of a bonfire and with the sunset falling over La Malinche in the background, the episode was played for the first time in public.
More than one person was moved to tears upon hearing the finished product, while others realized the impact of their struggle and how much they have achieved. And still for others, the story provided motivation to regroup and strengthen the fight.
Episodes of the first edition of Periodismo de lo posible are available on the project's website and on its Spotify channel.(Photo: Screenshot of periodismodeloposible.com)
“We realize how many things we have done. We, who have gone up to do work in the Malintzin many times. We take it more as a routine, but from the work that you have just shown us we realize all that we have done for the love of the Malintzin, for all those people who are no longer here, for those generations to come, for what we are going to leave them," Don Néstor, a member of the Collective of Renovation and Restoration of the Malintzi Tlalcuapan, told Torres after the premiere.
The Collective has fought to save the forest, which in recent years has been affected by the barkworm plague, while trying to rebuild the community’s link with the volcano. The Collective collaborated with Torres and her partner Jaromil Loyola to produce the episode.
The effects of the audio project were different from the impacts that are commonly expected from journalistic products, such as changes in policies, increased accountability or a high number of site visits. But it is just the kind of impact that the team behind Periodismo de lo posible, the project it was produced under, looks for.
Periodismo de lo posible (Journalism of the Possible) is an initiative of the communication organizations REDES, Ojo de Agua Comunicación, Quinto Elemento Lab and La Sandía Digital, financed by The Christensen Fund. As part of the project, these organizations aim to transform the way stories about community struggles and territorial defense are told. They do this through the creation of audio narratives that focus on the achievements of these communities in their struggle to resolve their conflicts.
Periodismo de lo posible consists of training teams of communicators in narrative podcasts and accompanying them in the production of an audio project.
“We have to rethink what an impact is in journalism. The number of clicks? In these cases, no. Let it go viral? Well, not in these cases,” journalist Marcela Turati, one of the project coordinators, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). "But in these cases it is the awareness, that these communities regroup, that they forgive each other, that they cry together, that they are proud of what they did, that they explain to those of us who live in the city what the defense of the territory is and make us rethink what we think about development.”
The first edition of Periodismo de lo posible was carried out over just over a year, between 2022 and 2023, with the participation of 12 teams from different states of Mexico. The resulting episodes, including “Tlaxcala: The awakening of the guardians of the forest,” were released weekly between August and November of last year.
The teams are currently working on the second edition, which started in May with the participation of eight teams. The themes of this year's projects range from the conservation of rivers and lakes to the defense of ancestral childbirth techniques, according to Turati.
“Part of the project is that we change the way we talk about community struggles and defense of the territory. Not everything is defeat, not everything is hopelessness, there are things that did help. And the things that helped, let's emphasize that by reporting how it went, how it was achieved, reporting with the community," Turati said. “[It is about] abandoning the fatalistic message to explore the possible and not just the impossible.”
The training portion of Periodismo de lo posible includes a 10-session online seminar, individual follow-up and two in-person training camps in journalism with a focus on what’s possible, investigation, and narrative and sound production.
One of the objectives of the training stage is to standardize the skills of the participants. Although the majority of those selected for the first edition belonged to some type of media outlet or community radio station, others were members of communities without formal journalistic training.
The training also includes budget management so that teams learn to make the best use of the financial support provided to them as part of the project.
“There were people who had never written and they felt ashamed. We told them 'talk about it, it doesn't matter if you don't write it. Record yourself with a script of what you want to say.’ And they themselves surprised us and did incredible things,” Turati said. “We as journalists learned where you accompany them and how you respect the methods they have to do things. As well as how you explain this other method to them.”
The podcasts resulting from this year's edition will premiere between January and June 2025 on the Periodismo de lo posible channel on Spotify, which hosts the episodes from the first edition. The stories will also be broadcast on a network of community radio stations throughout the country.
Acaba de concluir el 1° campamento de la 2° generación de @pdeloposible, un proyecto de #podcast narrativo sobre #defensadelterritorio, que impulsamos con @redesac_mx @quintoelab y Ojo de Agua. Felices de haber compartido un taller de foto con celular en este bello espacio. pic.twitter.com/4uIeZIodNg
— La Sandía Digital (@LaSandiaDigital) July 1, 2024
Turati said that Periodismo de lo posible is perhaps the most beautiful and hopeful project she has worked on. The first time she heard about the approach to “what is possible” in journalism was from Colombian journalist Javier Darío Restrepo. Together, they received the Recognition of Excellence from the Gabo Foundation in 2014.
“He always talked about how we left out what was possible and that it seemed that journalists focused on the latest misfortune and that we are not stopping to see what was achieved, or what was possible,” Turati said.
Although this type of journalism focuses on the achievements of a struggle, it is not about rosy stories or happy endings, she said. The podcasts seek to vindicate community battles and inform other groups with their own struggles, without romanticizing the issues.
"We journalists look for the 'what,’ 'who,’ 'how,’ 'when,’ 'where,’ but we don't ask 'what did you do about it, how did you deal with it?' And that is the most important part,” Turati said. “We dedicate ourselves to that part of how they faced the problem to achieve what they achieved. Without ignoring what hurt, what happened, the losses.”
Another of the objectives of Periodismo de lo posible is to establish a different relationship between journalism and social struggles, no longer as extractive journalism in which a journalist from the city arrives in a territory to report a story and never returns. Rather, it seeks to be journalism in which the communities themselves are co-authors of their stories, Turati said.
In fact, part of the initiative's commitment is that the authors of each podcast episode deliver the finished product to the community the story is about, the journalist added.
“We saw that people incorporated it in some way as an instrument of struggle. That podcast served as a business card for their struggle, for what they had achieved,” she said.
For Torres, it was a challenge to go beyond denunciation in the making of “Tlaxcala: The awakening of the guardians of the forest” and focus mainly on the positive actions of the community of San Pedro Tlalcuapan.
“For me, it was changing my chip completely and starting to speak from the possibilities that emerge from a change,” Torres told LJR. “It was very comforting to be part of Periodismo de lo posible because it totally changed my idea of what a problem looks like, how to turn a problem around and say what is happening. Those small actions that are making a difference in the face of this problem.”
Regarding the stories with a focus on the possible, the main character is not a specific person, but the community or even the territory they seek to defend. With that in mind, the organizations behind Periodismo de lo posible chose audio as a vehicle for the stories, Turati said, in order to create soundscapes in which the territory is one of the protagonists and evokes emotions.
Members of the environmentalist group whose struggle was told in the episode produced by the media outlet Escenario Tlaxcala moved to tears after the premiere. (Photo: Screenshot from Facebook Live)
To achieve this, the teams had the guidance of Eloísa Diez, documentary filmmaker and sound engineer at La Sandía Digital, an organization that produces audiovisual content for human rights advocacy.
Stories with a focus on the possible seek to reach different audiences than other types of stories about community struggles and defense of territory. One of them is the same protagonist community and others with similar conflicts, but also people from other regions with interest in issues of social struggles, according to Aranzazú Ayala, logistics and dissemination coordinator of Periodismo de lo possible.
“There are people who already knew about the problems but had never heard of a solution, only the complaint,” Ayala told LJR. “In the first season there was a story from [the state of] Puebla, where I am from. I had already reported it and I never saw anything hopeful about it. So I do think it changes the way we see things.”
Torres said that, after working so closely with the population of San Pedro Tlalcuapan, a collaborative spirit was created between the team at her media outlet, Escenario Tlaxcala, and that community. The journalist said that she is aware that, in journalism, this could be seen as unethical.
However, with Periodismo de lo posible she learned that in stories like these it is necessary to put sensitivity and empathy over objectivity, given that in most cases, the authors of the stories are members of the same community.
“From the moment you start working in media, they tell you 'be very objective, you don't have to get carried away by your feelings, by your passions, because ultimately you are communicating,” Torres said. “But at some point Marcela [Turati] told me that if I didn't get to feel the story, I wouldn't be able to convey what I wanted to convey.”
The journalist said that during the production of the podcast episode her team realized that the problems for the defenders of La Malinche also affected them because they live in the same region. At that moment, Torres said, they began to empathize with them.
“What we journalists should do is be empathetic with the realities or with the stories we are telling, because if there is no empathy, it will be very difficult for you to be sensitive to telling the story,” she said. “I do think that we journalists should be more sensitive to the realities we are covering.”
In July of this year, “Tlaxcala: The awakening of the forest guardians” received an award from Covering Climate Now in the Activism and Movements category, which recognizes coverage that engages with the substance and efficacy of the programs of environmental activist groups, according to the organization's website.
Journalist Thania Martínez, whose team developed the episode “Puebla: La lucha de un pueblo por existir” (Puebla: The struggle of a people to exist) in the first edition of Periodismo de lo posible, said that telling a story of defending territory from within the community does not necessarily means lacking the impartiality that journalism demands.
On the contrary, stories like those of Periodismo de lo posible help fill the information gaps left by traditional media in their coverage of community struggles, said Martínez, who works for the community media outlet Radio Tsinaka, in the Cuetzalan del Progreso municipality, in the state of Puebla.
Her podcast episode tells the story of Tecoltemic, an Indigenous community that organized to remove a mining company that planned to dynamite mountains in search of precious minerals from its territory.
“It is very normal that in these journalistic spaces [of the hegemonic media] our voices, experiences, challenges and threats are excluded and distorted,” Martínez told LJR. “I am part of Tecoltemic's struggle and I am the one who narrates the podcast. I must admit that there are many moments that touch my heart, however we do not seek to alter reality, knowing that it is not absolute.”
Esta es la 2a generación de "Periodismo de lo Posible", que está preparando ocho historias de resistencia y esperanza para compartirlas y difundir las luchas de lo posible en todos los territorios de México pic.twitter.com/FJU9pvjAGH
— Periodismo de lo posible (@pdeloposible) July 1, 2024
Torres said that the Collective agreed to have their struggle told by Periodismo de lo posible thanks to the fact that she had earned their trust before, when she covered previous conflicts for Escenario Tlaxcala. That, she said, made it easier for the group to see her as an ally, rather than an intruder.
“I think that we do have to be objective, but not from an objectivity that separates you from reality, but from an objectivity that invites you to tell that other worlds, other realities are possible,” Torres said.
