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.
The press in Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, no longer conducts investigative journalism following the death of Javier Valdez, a journalist from the Sinaloan weekly newspaper Ríodoce, who was killed on May 15 of this year.
Hitmen on motorcycles shot and killed journalist Carlos Williams Flores in the town of Tegucigalpita, Honduras on the afternoon of Sept 13.
Bolivian journalist Yadira Peláez took matters into her own hands after she apparently felt an investigation into her complaint of sexual harassment was going nowhere.
On Sept. 16 in São Paulo, the Rede de Jornalistas da Periferia (Network of Journalists of the Periphery) will hold Virada Comunicação 2017, an event to discuss and propose new approaches to journalism from the point of view of communicators and residents of the regions most disconnected from the centers of Brazil’s great cities.