In the first month of 2022, Latin America took the lead as the deadliest region for the press, with seven journalists killed: four in Mexico, two in Haiti and one in Honduras.
Three years after personally asking the President of Mexico for protection, journalist Lourdes Maldonado was shot dead in Tijuana. She is joined by two other colleagues who died violently in the country in less than a month, which colleagues, press freedom organizations, and citizens condemned.
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.
Betting on collaborative journalism, re-establishing a connection with the public, and incorporating the use of technology are among the effective measures presented by the panelists of “How journalism has reacted to waves of disinformation,” from the webinar “Journalism in Times of Polarization and Disinformation in Latin America."
The most recent edition of the Chapultepec Index of Freedom of Expression and the Press, from the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), recorded an improvement of 4.2 points on average in the 22 countries evaluated on the continent. The more positive overall picture comes with poor results from three of the largest countries in the region, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil, which lost the most points in the ranking.
The Committee to Protect Journalists published the Global Impunity Index that lists the top 12 countries where perpetrators of crimes against journalists go free. Mexico and Brazil are the Latin American countries that made the ranking.
Adela Navarro, winner of the 2021 Cabot Prize, spoke with LatAm Journalism Review (LJR) about her ideals when starting in journalism, how she achieved them in these 31 years of professional life and about her tireless fight for freedom of expression and of the press in one of the most dangerous countries for practicing journalism.
The efforts of the collaborative journalism initiative "The Cartel Project" to continue the unfinished work of the Mexican journalist Regina Martínez - murdered in 2012 - was recognized with a Special Citation at this year's Maria Moors Cabot Prize.
To understand the barriers for journalists with disabilities who want to enter newsrooms, as well as the treatment of persons with disabilities in the media, LatAm Journalism Review (LJR) spoke with media professionals in Latin America about their experience working in newsrooms and their advice for giving stories a human rights approach.
Professors Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly, both from the University of Arizona School of Journalism, have spent the past ten years doing field research, traveling through Mexico and interviewing more than 100 people to analyze violence against the press.
The GNI Startups Lab Hispanoamérica program was created and launched in mid-2021 by Sembramedia, with the support of Google News Initiative, and its objective is to strengthen the structures and business models of 10 digital native media in Latin America.
A recently published study revealed how journalists in Mexico and Brazil deal with the stress resulting from risky experiences in the profession, and how these experiences are connected to structural issues that affect the field of journalism.