Health journalism coverage in Latin America has evolved in recent decades, with the COVID-19 pandemic a key catalyst for change.
The experiences of five prominent journalists in the region—Marga Parés Arroyo from Puerto Rico, Ronny Suárez Celemín from Colombia, Rudy Jordán Espejo and Fabiola Torres from Peru and Liz Gascón from Venezuela— illustrate how health has gone from being a technical and sporadic topic in media to occupying a central place in the news.
Everyone agrees that the pandemic marked a before and after in the way the media and audiences approach health. But, although interest from the public and media has grown, the lack of resources and the emotional burden for those who cover these stories remain.
In addition, the journalists interviewed reflect on the evolution of public interest in health, the use of data and human-focused narratives, the growing attention to mental health, the importance of empathy in storytelling and the advancement of multimedia and collaborative formats.
Marga Parés Arroyo, health reporter from Puerto Rico. (Photo: Courtesy)
When talking about health journalism in Puerto Rico, one cannot fail to mention Marga Parés Arroyo. With almost 30 years of experience in media, Parés Arroyo has covered everything from Puerto Rico's Health Reform in the 90s, to the influenza epidemic in 2009, the various dengue outbreaks on the island and the COVID 19 pandemic that peaked between 2020 and 2021.
Parés Arroyo worked for almost three decades at media outlet El Nuevo Día and is now practicing independently.
“At that time, during my first years in journalism, health as a topic was not covered with that oversight element [of journalists investigating the government] that now exists,” Parés Arroyo told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “It was covered more from the point of view of medicine and diseases. It was more coverage of medicine and science, of interviews with people related to health.”
For Parés Arroyo, although the pandemic did mean a before and after in health journalism in Puerto Rico, the growth in audience interest in these topics has grown gradually over the years.
“Audiences were already asking for more coverage on health issues,” she said .“It was also seen at the business level. Different companies began to sponsor the media outlets: insurance companies, hospitals, manufacturing and distribution of medical products, nutritious food, etc.”
However, Parés Arroyo said, the pandemic brought a new element: lack of knowledge about the disease not only at the audience level, but also at the scientific level.
“There was no treatment, the vaccines took almost a year after the first cases,” she said. “That's why at a journalistic level, we were all forced to cover it. The topic was on all the covers and on all the radio and television programs.”
Parés Arroyo said that thanks to the pandemic, radio programs on health have multiplied in Puerto Rico, as well as the publication of specialized magazines.
“We are now more aware of the relevance that health has for the people, for the citizens, from ordinary citizens to the patient, the teacher, the neighbor, the grandfather, the businessman and the government leaders,” she said. “But there are only a few of us journalists who dedicate ourselves exclusively to health issues. The growth has been positive but there is much more to do.”
Fabiola Torres is the founder and director of Salud con Lupa (Photo: Courtesy)
Fabiola Torres is the founder and director of Salud con Lupa, the only media outlet specialized in the coverage and investigation of public health in Peru and Latin America.
The outlet was founded less than a year before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has since used the power of collaborative, evidence-based journalism to deliver its stories.
“The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the critical need for accurate, evidence-based reporting. Now, the use of statistical data, graphs and visual analysis is increasingly common to explain health phenomena,” Torres told LJR. “It has also remained a good practice among health journalists to produce more explanatory articles on concepts of medicine and science topics as happened with monkeypox, heat waves and to fact-check to help stop misleading and false information that proliferates on the Internet.”
However, Torres said, public health has stopped being a 'sexy' topic in recent years in the majority of Latin American media.
“I think we have experienced a hangover in journalism in general due to the exhausting coverage that the COVID-19 pandemic monopolized, but it does not mean that the audience has stopped being interested in health issues,” she said.
Torres said that public health and science issues are no longer part of the investigative priorities of most traditional and digital native media outlets.
“They have returned to what they did in the pre-pandemic times, that is, to only cover this topic occasionally and depending on the situation (epidemics, local health alerts, user discontent with health services),” she said.
Ronny Suárez Celemín from Colombia produces health content on his social media accounts. (Photo: Courtesy)
During the pandemic Ronny Suárez Celemín worked at El Tiempo, one of the leading newspapers in Colombia. He began covering news related to COVID-19 with an advantage – he started working on health topics in 2016.
“We journalists who had been covering health came to understand much more about epidemiological terms, for example, and to have better access to sources,” Suárez Celemín told LJR. “Many journalists from other beats who had to completely devote themselves to covering health from scratch had to learn quickly.”
Suárez Celemín said that, after the pandemic, he hoped Colombian newsrooms would be more aware of health issues, but that didn’t happen.
“I think the state of things, at least within the media, returned to the same [as it was pre-pandemic]. That is, very few journalists specialize in health,” he said. “There is also a lot of turnover of journalists within the newsrooms themselves. Generally, the journalist who covers health is a junior journalist who, due to work dynamics, does not want to stay long.”
Even Suárez Celemín himself left the beat for a while. Due to work and emotional overload he experienced after almost two years covering the pandemic, he left the El Tiempo newsroom and started working in corporate communications.
In November of last year, he started a project under his own brand and began producing health content on his social media accounts (X and Instagram) and also on his YouTube channel.
“I feel that people do value journalists specialized in health issues and this is a commitment to continue doing what I like.”
“Today we have global coverage in health journalism, many alliances of regional digital media, or digital media from different countries", said Peruvian journalist Rudy Jordán Espejo.
During the pandemic, while many journalists were behind a desk analyzing data, reporter Rudy Jordán Espejo took to the streets to document what was happening in Peru.
His work earned him the Roche Prize for Health Journalism in 2021 for ‘COVID-19: 100 días de la pandemia del coronavirus’ (COVID-19: 100 days of the coronavirus pandemic), a documentary that shows the impact of COVID-19 in Peru from the time the first case was reported by the government on March 6, 2020 through the first hundred days.
“Before, health coverage had space in the press, a page in the newspapers and a sporadic appearance in the newscasts, but it was not an issue of much importance,” Jordán Espejo said. “Today we have global coverage in health journalism, many alliances of regional digital media, or digital media from different countries. I think there is more awareness about health in our lives, but we have not yet achieved satisfactory, equitable and comprehensive access. There is still a need for greater coverage at the local level.”
Furthermore, Jordán Espejo said in-depth reports on health currently compete “with social networks, viral content and the public's disenchantment that health is a chronic and irreversible evil.”
Jordán Espejo said the pandemic, in addition to bringing an increase in interest in public and personal health, also positioned mental health as a new topic on the radar of media.
He also highlighted that more and more multimedia, photographic and documentary reporting related to health issues is coming out.
“If something persists in journalism, it is the persuasive power of stories, the richness of reporting, because this allows us to empathize, to feel something in common with the people we see or read about,” he said. “I recommend watching Traditional Midwifery in Oaxaca, by Diana Manzo, Migrant Networks in the Pandemic by Nadia Sanders or the impressive work of Peruvian photographer Marco Garro on mining pollution in Cerro de Pasco.”
Journalist Liz Gascón, as part of the team at Venezuelan digital media outlet El Pitazo, has participated in journalistic projects related to health issues and coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. (Photo: Courtesy)
Journalist Liz Gascón, as part of the team at Venezuelan digital media outlet El Pitazo, has participated in journalistic projects related to health issues and coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. For her, the pandemic brought a change in the way she gets stories or approaches sources.
“Now we are much more respectful,” she said. “Everyone around us had family members or loved ones who had consequences from or even died as a result of the coronavirus, we learned to approach people with much more respect and we are much more human.”
An example is El Pitazo’s coverage of kidney patients in Venezuela. Gascón said the media outlet has been carrying out coverage more oriented towards telling the patients' daily lives with respect and empathy.
Gascón said Venezuelan journalists now have a greater understanding of the importance of health and having services that work. This has meant that the health beat is no longer the wild card in Venezuelan media, but is being given more space.
However, Gascón said that Venezuela is a particular case due to the decrease in print media and the reduced number of reporters in the interior of the country.
Even so, there are examples of collaborative journalistic work, carried out before the pandemic, such as ‘Generación del hambre’ (Generation of hunger), winner of the 2019 Ortega y Gasset prize, in the best multimedia coverage category; ‘Voces del desamparo' (Voices of hopelessness), recipient of honorable mention from the 2019 IAPA Award and the podcast 'Condenado a morir de tuberculosis' (Condemned to die of tuberculosis), winner of the 2020 Roche Award, in the sound journalism category.
One pattern Gascón said she recognized is that after the coronavirus, the media in Venezuela talk much more about mental health.
“Before it wasn't addressed as much,” she said. “Useful information is now given at the end of the articles or within the text. We put the contacts of organizations that offer free therapy or reproductive health services, etc. Before it was covered with more technical, more distant language, now it is closer [to the audience].”
