LatAm Journalism Review spoke with five journalists from the region who suffered some type of physical violence in their coverage of recent protests in Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia and shows the vulnerability of press professionals from protesters of different political strata and also from security forces.
The spike of public protests that sometimes turned violent has not been met with enough preparation by Latin American journalists who find themselves in the midst of confrontations, experts say.
Journalists who become targets in polarized societies must support each other, persevere in doing investigative journalism, and always check the information in their stories, concluded participants in the panel “Polarization: Challenges for Journalists who Become Targets in Polarized Societies,” which was part of the event “Journalism in Times of Polarization and Disinformation in Latin America.”
Colombia’s FLIP denounced that the organization in charge of protecting journalist Claudia Julieta Duque collected sensitive data from the reporter through detailed monitoring from the GPS installed in her vehicle given as part of a protection scheme.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that Colombia is responsible for the violation of several human rights of journalist Jineth Bedoya Lima as a result of the crime of which she was a victim in 2000.
When the return of Cambio magazine –previously a reference for investigative journalism in Colombia– was announced, it generated debate around press freedom and the situation of the media in the country.
The Colombian Foundation for Press Freedom decided that the problem of the country's news deserts should be addressed more directly. And to try to solve it, it created a media outlet and mobile journalism lab so that people from different municipalities can create and disseminate local information.
Smaller print newspapers across Latin America have had to adapt to changes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated transitions to digital and forced the publications to find new revenue streams.
Laboratorio de Historias Poderosas, or the Powerful Stories Laboratory, was born in early 2021 as a means of expanding traditional media narratives to include women and LGBTQ+ people in coverage.
This story was originally published by the Reuter's Institute at the University of Oxford and has been republished here with permission. The pandemic has worsened the economic outlook for many news publishers. At the same time, it has afforded an opportunity to diversify revenue streams by offering service journalism and editorial products more directly connected to readers’ […]