The Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Festival in Medellín, Colombia recognized four Latin American journalism reporting projects from Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Honduras on Sept. 29 as part of the 2017 Gabo Awards.
International and Puerto Rican media have set up shop in the Puerto Rico Convention Center, creating a de facto newsroom in the same building where officials give press conferences and citizens look for resources.
Media and journalism associations in Bolivia are on alert due to a proposal to reform the Penal Code that is under debate in the country's Congress. They claim that Article 200 of the new Code, which provides for sanctions against professional misconduct, poses a threat to press freedom by opening the door to the criminalization of journalists in that country.
When you think about the situation of journalists in Mexico, the first image that comes is one of violence. And for good reason. The country is considered the most dangerous in the American continent to practice this profession. In 2017 alone, at least 11 journalists have been recorded as killed for reasons related to their work.
Brazil has seen dozens of independent journalism initiatives emerge in recent years, many of them launched with the proposal of innovating in terms of content and the ways it’s presented. One challenge facing most of these initiatives concerns financial sustainability: how to generate the income needed to improve journalistic quality, keeping content accessible to as many people as possible?
They got to work securing transmitter antenna and covering the windows of their newsrooms with plywood. Enough food and water were purchased to last for several days. Volunteers were called in to relieve exhausted employees when the time came that they couldn’t stay awake any longer, or had to attend to their own families and homes.
Employees from Honduran newspaper El Libertador found a message appearing to threaten its journalists in front of their offices on Sept. 21 in Tegucigalpa. This comes a month after newspaper director Johnny Lagos and his wife, Lurbin Yadira, also a journalist, survived a shooting.
Em apenas um ano, jornalistas brasileiros receberam mais de R$ 2,8 milhões em prêmios por seu trabalho. O dado é do relatório publicado recentemente pelo premiosdejornalismo.com, site que cataloga premiações disponíveis para profissionais do Brasil com a ideia de que essas oportunidades contribuem para o fortalecimento da profissão.
On Sept. 19, a justice of the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court (STF for its acronym in Portuguese) overturned prior censorship imposed on Portal 180graus, journalistic site of Piauí in northeastern Brazil, which was decided by a State judge at the end of August.
In just one year, Brazilian journalists received almost $1 million (U.S.) in prizes for their work. This is according to a recent report published by premiosdejornalismo.com, a site that catalogs awards available to journalists working in the South American country, with the idea that these prizes contribute to strengthening the trade.
“It’s been 17 years of this red accounting (cuenta roja) in which we have not stopped counting the number of journalists killed. There are 109, and a good part of them in the last two administrations,” said Daniela Pastrana, director of Mexican journalists organization Periodistas de a Pie. “But the counting began, paradoxically, with the start of the democratic transition. That is one of the things that I still cannot explain.”
In its two years of existence, Peruvian site Convoca has produced investigative reports based on the law of transparency and access to information that were internationally awarded and even motivated a legislative change in Peru. Now, Convoca will use its expertise to help train the next generations of investigative journalists who will monitor those in power in the country.