Bills making their way through Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies will be closely followed by a new kind of beat reporter: a news-producing robot, the first of its kind in the country.
Bills making their way through Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies will be closely followed by a new kind of beat reporter: a news-producing robot, the first of its kind in the country.
It was a sunny day in May when members of the Chequeado team carefully laid out a large board game in Plaza Moreno in La Plata, Argentina. The whole scene had an air of whimsy: dice that require two hands to hold, icons that stood 4 feet tall and circus performers that called passersby to try their hand at the fact-checking site’s version of “La Oca,” or the Game of the Goose.
At 34 years of age, 16 of them dedicated to journalism, Guatemalan Martín Rodríguez Pellecer can already count among his achievements the creation and establishment of two media outlets that have changed the journalistic panorama of his country.
Inspired by the power of messaging applications to create personal relationships with news readers, a trio of veteran Chilean journalists set out this year to offer a news bot that would keep voters informed during the country’s upcoming elections.
Although the promise the internet would be a way to create a global village has, to some extent, been achieved, digital media have also allowed the production of hyperlocalized and hyperspecialized information. In Brazil, where 66 percent of the population is connected to the Internet, social networks have allowed the creation of hyperlocal media – pages and groups that focus on a neighborhood, a place or even a street.
At the beginning of the year, eight independent Brazilian journalism organizations started to think about how to stimulate a collaborative culture among independent journalism newsrooms in Brazil and Latin America. The result of this collective was Festival 3i, held in Rio de Janeiro from Nov. 11 to 12.
Globally, journalists are not keeping pace with the digital revolution. This is according to a recent survey from The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), “The State of Technology in Global Newsrooms.”
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?
International organization Chicas Poderosas is furthering its mission of joining women journalists and technology in today’s newsrooms with a series of design thinking workshops that will launch Aug. 22 in Rio de Janeiro.
A mix between journalism and Pokemon Go – this is how site Agência Pública defines its first application, Museu do Ontem (the Museum of Yesterday). On the platform, instead of capturing monsters, the user explores the Port of Rio de Janeiro in search of news reports, excerpts of books, and audio, to understand the region's past and present.
From the start, journalists are taught that the profession is important for society and for the defense of democracy. But how can that relevance be measured in people’s everyday lives?