After the Puerto Rican government published that the passage of Hurricane Maria over the island left only 64 people dead, local media such as the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI, for its initials in Spanish) began to question official statistics and to investigate further.
In 2018, access to the internet and the possibility of expressing yourself through various platforms and social networks, like blogs, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter are almost expected by a significant portion of the Latin American population.
Since 2013, Agência Pública has raised more funds through collective financing on the Catarse platform, the largest in Brazil, than any other journalistic organization. We held three campaigns, one every two years, to finance our Reportagem Pública (Public Report) project. In total, 2,429 readers supported us with R $231,167 (about US $67,000).
It seems like stories with a global impact, like the Panama Papers, awoke a sleeping lion in Latin America so that all kinds of journalistic collaborations are now being produced. There are many who want to replicate this emblematic case, and some believe that it is a matter of simply applying magic formulas and voilà! You have a high-impact story.
Latin American innovators talk comic journalism, interactive graphics, transnational collaboration and diversifying revenue models
Over the span of one year, U.S.-based Spanish-language broadcaster Univision and Salvadoran digital investigative site El Faro partnered to investigate and map the experience of Central American refugees. The result is a bilingual four-part multimedia project released in October, “From Migrants to Refugees: The New Plight of Central Americans,” which profiles several refugees from the region at different stages in their journey to safety.
In the second week of November, journalists from at least 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries crossed the Atlantic Ocean and met in Johannesburg, South Africa, to share investigative techniques with colleagues from around the world and seek strategies to consolidate collaboration among journalists in the region.
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.
Residents of favelas, villages and low-income neighborhoods all over Brazil gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the 1st National Meeting of Communication of the Peripheries. After four days of discussion between Oct. 12 and 15, 70 activists and communicators wrote a statement in which they committed to creating a network of support and action to use communication as a tool to fight for life and to guarantee human rights.
The anchors are experienced journalists reporting national stories and interviewing the nation’s leaders for a professionally-produced television news program. Everything about the two-hour daily newscast from Peruvian newspaper Correo looks and operates like a professional newscast.
On July 12, a Brazilian federal judge sentenced former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to nine and a half years in prison for corruption, obstruction of justice and money laundering in relation to the Lava Jato case, a corruption scheme in at least 12 countries involving several Brazilian companies and politicians in Latin America.
What appeared to be a case of money laundering done through a network of laundromats and car washes (in Portuguese, lava jato means “pressure washing”), turned out to be the largest corruption network in Brazilian history that ultimately extended to at least 12 countries. It has brought businessmen to justice and has shaken more than one government.