By Ian Tennant
A new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will help two Latin American journalists extend their Knight Latin American Nieman Fellowships so they can explore projects that may create new ways to keep citizens informed while also enhancing a free press.
Guatemalan journalist Claudia Méndez Arriaza and Colombian journalist Carlos Eduardo Huertas are among the 24 journalists named to the 2012 class of Nieman Fellows in May. Méndez is an editor and staff writer for El Periódico and co-host of the television program “A las 8:45” in Guatemala, while Huertas is an investigations editor for Revista Semana in Colombia.
The new grant, worth nearly $200,000, from the Knight Foundation to the Nieman Foundation for Journalism will help these two journalists "discover new ways to inform and engage their communities and foster a free press in their own countries," the foundation said July 12.
The funding encourages Méndez and Huertas to work on projects that may "involve in-depth coverage of a story, the creation of a new journalistic enterprise or research on policy and its impact."
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
