Digital natives are leading the way to produce quality journalism for their communities
Each year, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas puts on a series of roundtable discussions with Latin American journalists. It’s called the Coloquio Iberoamericano, and it’s conducted in Spanish, but the staff prepared summaries in English.
I personally watched the nearly five hours on Zoom from here in Spain, along with some 525 others from around the world. A total of 2,600 watched on the video platform. There were seven video sessions featuring 33 speakers, many of whom I have written about here in my blog posts.
Javier Moreno, editor-in-chief of El País, Spain’s most influential daily, had a success story to tell. The publication went from zero to 100,000 subscribers in just 11 months, which helped offset some of the drastic decline in advertising revenue that media generally suffered during the pandemic (English summary of his comments here).
El País established a paywall originally in 2002 (I was a subscriber), but the paper lost readers and advertising revenue, so the system was abandoned after two years. The market just wasn’t ready. However, during the pandemic, with misinformation about the virus everywhere, readers have turned to well-known media brands like El País for trustworthy content.
Moreno hopes to reach 250,000 paid subscribers in two years, but he has a dream goal of 500,000, which he believes would stabilize the newspaper financially. While he loves print, he said it is a pale reflection of the digital product, which can offer more depth and multimedia elements that enrich the user experience.
Collaboration across borders
In the session about how to do transnational investigations, journalists from Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Uruguay participated.
Colombian journalist María Teresa Ronderos, co-founder and director of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, said there is no formula for a successful collaboration. Each one “depends on the story, how it is put together, depends on the partners, on twenty thousand things.”
Because of that, she recommends doing a pre-editing process to make sure that the proposed investigation is journalistic rather than just on a general topic. And finally, each of the partners should be ready to do a rigorous verification of data and sources to guarantee credibility.
Fabiola Torres, director and founder of Salud con Lupa (Health under the Magnifying Glass), talked of how it was important to go beyond covering simply the covid-19 virus in various countries. Journalists should investigate the underlying causes and the institutions that are supposed to control the spread.
One transnational investigation by her group looked at how pharmaceutical companies’ donations to government health agencies influenced vaccine policy in those countries. The site’s investigations also have included computer scientists, social researchers, and doctors to give more depth and substance.
Harnessing technology
This session was chaired by Marco Túlio Pires, of Google News Lab Brazil, and featured five technology projects developed in partnership with Google.
Miguel Paz of Chile developed a payment platform, Reveniu, for small and medium-sized media organizations to easily accept donations or subscription payments.
This is not easy to do in Latin America because of the lack of smooth technology links between banks, credit card companies, other payment platforms, and the media themselves. An even bigger barrier, Paz said, is organizational culture within the media, which get mired in time-wasting bureaucracy.
Joan Melano, CEO of Croma in Argentina, has developed machine-learning software designed to help news organizations understand and serve their customers better. The algorithms help the media organizations recommend articles with greater context based on their users’ behavior.
As he explained, the algorithm builds a database of all the content of the media outlet “so that the machine or the algorithm can learn from what has been published in the past and can relate all the news that has been generated, to add context, relevance, and navigability.” The tool can also help predict which content is most likely to attract and retain paying subscribers.
Government harassment of critics
One of the sobering realities for journalists working in Latin America is how governments and their business and political allies will gang up to suppress critical voices. Five journalists from Brazil, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico told their stories during this panel.
Carlos Dada, co-founder and director of the digital media outlet El Faro in El Salvador, described how the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has taken to attacking their organization on Saturday nights, “which he himself calls Bullying Saturdays.”
El Faro is known for its fearless investigations of corruption, including that of President Bukele. His government has responded with a common tactic used against media in Latin America–the interminable financial audit. The government has accused Dada and El Faro of money laundering and has demanded information about donations.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, founder and director of El Confidencial in Nicaragua, has suffered the government takeover of the publication’s offices and confiscation of computers and other equipment. His former office now houses a government agency. The regime of President Daniel Ortega has systematically shut down media critical of the government.
In Venezuela, the Supreme Court ordered the independent newspaper El Nacional to pay a fine of $US 13 million for “for moral damage and defamation” caused to the No. 2 person in the president’s circle, Diosdado Cabello. The newspaper had published an investigation that showed Cabello’s supposed connections with organized crime.
Luz Mely Reyes, co-founder and director of Efecto Cocuyo in Venezuela, said the government is also creating shadowy news outlets dedicated discrediting the work of journalists.
Links to the other Coloquio panels follow:
- Velocity fund helps Latin American digital media to professionalize organizations, diversify and be sustainable
- Ibero-American science journalists discuss challenges and advice for covering pandemic in midst of an ‘infodemic’
- Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism closes with announcement of new digital journalism association in Brazil, ebook and podcast