The funding crisis, the emergence of artificial intelligence, the loss of credibility in the media, and attacks on the press are some of the challenges that media outlets in Latin America are responding to with various types of innovative projects.
Representatives from seven media outlets and organizations presented their initiatives during the panel “Special Projects from Latin America” at the 18th Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism, held March 29, 2025, as part of the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) at the University of Texas at Austin.
José Nieves, editor-in-chief of the Cuban digital outlet elTOQUE, spoke about the strategies that Latin American media in exile are experimenting with to strengthen their business models at a time when opportunities for grants and support from international cooperation are increasingly scarce.
Brazilian journalist Paula Miraglia said that the relationship between tech platforms and the press is marked by a deep power imbalance. (Photo: Patricia Lim/Knight Center)
The journalist said that in recent months, he conducted a series of interviews with news media directors for his video podcast “Hablando en Plata,” which was part of his program as a 2024 ICFJ Knight Fellow. From those interviews, he concluded that it is urgent for media in exile to find ways to diversify their business models.
“We cannot depend on grants, and there is no time to look for long-term solutions,” Nieves said. “We have to move quickly to create other ways to generate income that will allow us to reduce our dependence on grants.”
The journalist warned that the recent withdrawal of support from U.S. entities—along with the disappearance of more and more European grants, the pullback of funding from tech companies like Meta, and NGOs like the Open Society Foundations—could lead to the disappearance of many independent media outlets.
“This is a perfect storm that could lead to a mass extinction event,” he said. “But from the resilience of Latin American media in exile, we can test these models to help us continue operating over time.”
Nieves shared nine business model approaches that his interviewees said they had experimented with: consulting agency services, membership and donation programs, training sessions, subscription programs, event organizing, book publishing, advertising and sponsorship sales, stores, and technology development.
Building a community of readers or users plays a fundamental role in most of these funding strategies, Nieves said. However, he warned that it is important to clearly distinguish between community and audience.
“An audience is not a community. We all have an audience, but very few have a community,” he said. “Community is a kind of relationship with our users that flattens hierarchies and makes them feel more involved, more a part of our work, and more responsible for our survival.”
Nieves said that exiled media outlets should understand themselves as local media serving diasporic communities in the countries where they are in exile, as this opens up opportunities with other sources of funding, such as local businesses, local philanthropy, and support spaces for local media in countries like the United States.
For her part, Brazilian journalist Paula Miraglia, founder of outlets like Nexo Jornal and Gama Revista, said that tech platforms are now the main intermediaries between media and their audiences. But this relationship is marked by a deep power imbalance with enormous consequences for the press, she added.
“We depend on them for everything,” Miraglia said. “And with the emergence of new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, our way of working, of thinking, of existing as media organizations is going to change.”
Miraglia created Momentum – Journalism and Tech Task Force, a global think tank based in Brazil that, through research, mobilization, dialogue promotion and scenario analysis, seeks to build solutions that can positively impact the media ecosystem in the face of tech company dominance.
“We are constantly reacting to their decisions—we’re always behind,” Miraglia said. “We need to have our own vision of our industry, to understand what kind of relationship we want to have with technology. That’s a fundamental change. If we don’t do that, we’ll be stuck accepting the crumbs tech companies give us.”
Momentum also advocates for regulatory models and public policies that support technological development in service of public interest journalism. Miraglia highlighted that Brazil has been a pioneer in seeking legislation to regulate the work of tech platforms and to demand compensation for media outlets, although, she said, these efforts have faced massive lobbying from big tech companies.
Mexican journalist Pedro Iván Quintana is in charge of the AI Unit of the media group Organización Editorial Mexicana. (Photo: Patricia Lim/Knight Center)
Momentum has published research-based materials, including a report for Brazilian editors on journalism and artificial intelligence. Miraglia also said they are in the process of creating a free-access interface that media outlets can use to better control how much access AI platforms have to their content.
Another panelist who believes journalists should not cede control to tech companies is Pedro Iván Quintana, a journalist at Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM), a conglomerate of 45 digital and print media outlets across the country.
Quintana said that journalists should be the ones to decide how AI tools are used in newsrooms. That is the premise of his work as coordinator of OEM’s AI unit, which seeks to develop a centralized system of guidelines for the use of this technology across the group’s 45 media outlets, with the goal of leveraging AI under ethical, coordinated, journalist-led standards and solutions.
“We need to create a centralized ecosystem that we develop internally, with projects in the hands of journalists who understand what newsroom work is about—not leave it up to tech companies to do the work they think we need,” Quintana said.
The journalist said that large groups like OEM—which has more than 900 employees across 45 outlets in 25 states—face the enormous challenge of coordinating how their teams use AI.
To do so, OEM’s AI unit undertook the task of consulting with the head of each newsroom in the group to determine what types of AI tools were being used and how. They also sought to identify the specific needs that led journalists to turn to AI in the first place.
With the information gathered in that diagnosis, the AI unit is trying to find the best ways to use the technology: which tools, with what parameters, and under which ethical codes, Quintana said. The unit aims for those ethical codes to be uniform, controlled by OEM, and responsive to the challenges faced by their newsrooms.
“We believe [AI] can be a great ally—we’ve seen that through small experiments in the organization’s newsrooms—helping to optimize tasks so we can free up journalists to focus on what matters most: quality journalism. And we can delegate repetitive tasks to AI tools,” he said.
Journalist David Gómez-Fernandini, founder of the independent Peruvian outlet Epicentro.TV, said that after taking the Knight Center course “Digital content creators and journalists: How to be a trusted voice online” in November 2024, he learned strategies used by influencers to build stronger relationships with their followers.
In particular, the journalist said Epicentro.TV—which was created to fill the gap in investigative journalism on human rights and the environment left by Peru’s mainstream media—is putting those strategies into practice to build community and connect with its audience in a more horizontal way.
“We learned the importance of [...] creating content that we previously thought couldn’t be done from TV, that a journalist couldn’t do what an influencer does,” Gómez-Fernandini said. “But we’ve learned that’s exactly what we have to do, and to speak to people in one or two minutes to spark interest in topics they can then explore in depth through our investigations or programs streamed online.”
The outlet, which launched in 2021 after its four founders left the América Televisión channel due to pressure during that year’s presidential elections in Peru, has since gained more than 100,000 followers on both Facebook and YouTube, and nearly 80,000 on TikTok.
One of the strategies they learned from digital content creators is holding meetings with their readers. The outlet now holds virtual meetups and is planning in-person gatherings to get to know its audience more closely, Gómez-Fernandini said.
The journalist added that Peru has experienced political instability over the past eight years, with six presidents coming and going. During that time, there have been several attempts to weaken democracy, such as the March 12 passage of a law targeting NGOs and the stiffening of penalties for defamation and slander. As a result, many journalists now prefer not to publish on certain topics out of fear of legal harassment, Gómez-Fernandini said.
Epicentro.TV is currently facing the consequences of those efforts to silence critical voices—most notably in the case of judicial harassment against Daniel Yovera, one of the outlet’s founders. In 2016, Yovera published a report that exposed alleged land appropriation by the Catholic organization Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.
“He was harassed in court for years, which drained his time, energy, and became a financial burden for both him and Epicentro,” Gómez-Fernandini said.
Another of the outlet’s founders, Clara Elvira Ospina, has also been the target of smear campaigns, xenophobia, and online disinformation, allegedly with the involvement of public officials, the journalist added.
Maria Martha Bruno, international partnerships coordinator at the Brazilian organization Agência Pública, spoke about the importance of cross-border journalistic collaboration and the opportunities partnerships offer for journalism in Brazil and across Latin America.
“With the new international and geopolitical landscape we’re living in, we know that Brazil and Latin America now have a more prominent role, in which we’re deeply involved and have significant influence,” Bruno said.
Puerto Rican journalist Selymar Colón presented the digital media she leads, Platea, focused on young people between the ages of 25 and 45. (Photo: Patricia Lim/Knight Center)
She explained that through international partnerships, Agência Pública seeks to strengthen collaborative content production with foreign outlets, expand content republication abroad, position the organization as an international reference on key issues, and boost its global brand visibility.
As examples of impactful international collaborations, Bruno mentioned joint projects such as Digital Mercenaries, Nicotine Networks, and Slaveholders Project, which Agência Pública carried out with other regional media organizations.
The goal of these partnerships, Bruno said, is to create impact and highlight how Latin American media investigate power structures.
“In this moment of vulnerability for media in several regional democracies, it’s absolutely essential that we work together to amplify the voice of Latin American journalism across the region,” Bruno said. “That’s why partnerships involving knowledge-sharing, joint efforts, and funding—which we all need—are things that strengthen our media and help protect our democracies, and in turn, protect journalism.”
Meanwhile, the founders of Platea, a digital outlet from Puerto Rico, spoke about how they are using service journalism to help millennials regain trust in the media.
Selymar Colón, executive director of Platea, explained that the outlet targets people aged 25 to 45—a bridge generation between younger and older adults. Since this group doesn’t consume traditional news, Platea focuses on service journalism, data, and technology to engage them.
To do this, the outlet uses a different narrative approach that explains problems and proposes solutions relevant to Puerto Rico and to this generation, Colón said—using language and formats tailored to their preferences.
“We’re committed to changing the narrative we so often see and hear, shaped by how topics have traditionally been covered in Puerto Rico,” said Rolón. “We want to move away from pessimism and toward opportunity—a more optimistic narrative that allows us to keep growing in Puerto Rico.”
Platea’s service journalism is presented in the form of explanatory guides designed to inspire readers to take action based on the information, Rolón said. These are distributed across multiple platforms, from reels to newsletters.
According to Andrea Pérez, another co-founder, recommendation guides on places and activities were a key element in community building during Platea’s early years, generating strong engagement among young adults—especially at a time when people were eager to reconnect after COVID-19 restrictions.
“What we want to avoid is looking back in 5 or 10 years and asking, ‘Why don’t young people stay informed?’” Colón said. “It’s because they didn’t have a place to go for information they could trust. We’re working now to build that place so that when the time comes, Platea will already be there for them.”
To close out the Special Projects round, journalist and Google News Initiative (GNI) trainer Mariana Alvarado spoke about the training and sustainability programs Google offers for journalists and newsrooms in Latin America.
Alvarado said that after a pandemic-related pause, Google News Lab—GNI’s initiative to train journalists in digital tools at newsrooms or universities—has relaunched with a new focus on artificial intelligence.
Google is currently promoting training on tools fully powered by generative AI, such as Notebook LM (for note-taking and research), Gemini (a natural language processing model), and Pinpoint (for managing data in multiple formats), Alvarado said.
She also introduced the GNI Growth Labs, which provide training and consulting for newsrooms on audience and revenue growth. These consist of customized sessions with each newsroom and the creation of tailored improvement plans.
“The idea is to take advantage of all these tools, which have been around for years but are still not widely known,” Alvarado said. “We want to support journalism—but also start focusing more on sustainability.”
