Journalists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as Spain and Portugal, were recipients of the 2018 King of Spain International Journalism Awards.
It’s been a tumultuous few years of Brazilian news. A year after the World Cup frenzy and the presidential election that ended in an impeachment a few months later, newsrooms turned inward: Which would be the next to downsize? As company after company laid off employees, some journalists in São Paulo began to wonder just how many reporters and editors had become unemployed in the shrinking of the news industry in Brazil in the past couple of years.
From 2001 to 2017, fourteen media organizations were launched in Cuba that are already having impact on and off the island. Most of their teams have fewer than a dozen journalists, and many of them are volunteers. All these media sites have reporters working from Havana, but 50 percent have offices or newsrooms in foreign cities, such as Miami, Mexico City and Valencia, Spain.
Digital and social media activity continues to increase throughout the world, and Latin America is no exception.
What began as a simple interest has turned into a passion project for Verónica Sanchis Bencomo. Through her website Foto Féminas, the photographer publishes monthly features in Spanish and English that highlight the work of female photographers in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Now Sanchis has taken her work from the web to a library.
Cuban digital media site 14ymedio is betting on a new membership program for readers to ensure its independence and increase engagement.
On Oct. 3, the governor of Puerto Rico announced that 63 of 69 hospitals in the U.S. territory were “operational.” It was an unbelievable achievement since Hurricane Maria had made landfall almost two weeks prior as a Category 4 hurricane. Regardless, a local non-profit focused on investigative journalism sought to uncover the truth.
Over the span of one year, U.S.-based Spanish-language broadcaster Univision and Salvadoran digital investigative site El Faro partnered to investigate and map the experience of Central American refugees. The result is a bilingual four-part multimedia project released in October, “From Migrants to Refugees: The New Plight of Central Americans,” which profiles several refugees from the region at different stages in their journey to safety.
Following the October murder of Mexican photojournalist Edgar Esqueda in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, a cellphone video sent to a former police officer spread on the internet. It showed Esqueda, bound and on his knees, offering the names of crime reporters at newspapers across the state. In response, San Luis Potosí Gov. Juan Manuel Carreras ordered immediate protection measures—a police patrol car for every reporter named in the video.
Although the promise the internet would be a way to create a global village has, to some extent, been achieved, digital media have also allowed the production of hyperlocalized and hyperspecialized information. In Brazil, where 66 percent of the population is connected to the Internet, social networks have allowed the creation of hyperlocal media – pages and groups that focus on a neighborhood, a place or even a street.