The main objective of the creation of the Law on Personal Data Protection– enacted on July 11, 2013 and effective in all of its rules since May 8, 2015 – was to protect the personal data of those who feel vulnerable by its publication, like its comercial use by private companies, up to achieving the removal of news related to information in question from the internet.
Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist known for reports on the National Security Agency (NSA), launched The Intercept Brasil, a country-specific version of the site he co-founded in 2014.
Rodolfo Romero is 27 years-old. He received money from the government to finance a news site. It was going to be called Cuba accuses (Cuba acusa) but he did not like the belligerent tone of the name, so he decided to call it Cuba denounces (Cuba denuncia) only to discover that was the name of a site created by exiled Cuban dissidents. Therefore, Romero edits the site Pensar en Cuba (Thinking of Cuba) along with a team that depends on the Ministry of Culture. Through it, the various policies of the United States concerning Cuba in the last 50 years are denounced.
Brazilian fact-checking startup Aos Fatos (translated as To the Facts) is celebrating its one-year anniversary and already making plans to expand its digital presence and to invest in publishing via video. Created in July 2015, the organization is dedicated to verifying facts and statements made by authorities, a journalistic practice that has become known as fact-checking.
Voters of 5,570 Brazilian municipalities will go to the polls this year to choose the future leaders and legislators of their cities. A journalism institute has just released an online manual to help the local journalist whose job it is to inform these citizens ahead of municipal elections.
The news team of the Sunday newscast Panorama was criminally charged by the Peruvian Defense Minister Jakke Valakivi after publishing a official secret documents that allegedly show evidence of embezzlement of resources of the Army Intelligence Service. The journalists could face a sentence of up to 15 years in prison for the crime of treason.
The task in front of Ana María Ruelas, the new director of the Article 19 Mexico and Central America office, will not be simple. In what is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist, she leads a team that fights daily for basic freedoms for communicators: access to information, protection from bodily harm and guarantees to freely carry out their work.
Theaters in the streets to relay information, chronicles in indigenous languages and unknown stories from rural communities that don’t appear on the traditional news agenda. This is what some digital native media outlets in Latin America are producing and promoting.
Latin American journalists and editors gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina earlier this month to share experiences and successful methods for producing a kind of investigative journalism that has been growing in the region: fact-checking.
Update (June 16, 2016): Journalist Marcelo Auler was permitted to republish eight of the ten articles censored on his blog. Judge Vanessa Bassani threw out the lawsuit for compensation filed by investigator Maurício Moscardi Grillo after finding an error in the original petition: the home address of the investigator is located in a neighborhood served by another court, which means the original judge should not have heard the case.
In order to ensure a more transparent electoral process, on June 5, the Peruvian data journalism portal Convoca decided to carry out a project to provide readers, in real-time and from its own website, the results of the second round of elections for the country’s presidency. The news site also created a social media campaign where people could report irregularities in the voting process.
Journalistic associations and professionals in Argentina warn that a bill pending in the legislature threatens freedom of expression in the country. If the initiative is passed, reporters who disclose names and information of people who could be involved in crimes of money laundering and tax evasion could be arrested.