Blog

By Julia Frias Aguilar, Dieter Mouchkatine and Mauricio Davila

Ibero-American journalists are betting on collaboration, creativity and independent journalism to confront the existential challenges facing the industry and humanity today — from democratic crises around the world to the rise of artificial intelligence.

Those were some of the central themes of the 19th Ibero-American Journalism Colloquium, held Sept. 19 at the University of Texas at Austin and organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Following the conclusion of the 27th International Symposium on Online Journalism on Sept. 17-18, journalists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal gathered at the Colloquium to discuss some of the region’s biggest challenges.

Renowned Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui set the tone for the gathering by describing the current moment as a “civilizational shift.” In that context, she said, journalism must not lose sight of the ethical questions that come with that shift or how humans relate to each other.

“Humanity has to be at the center,” she said.

For many Colloquium participants, partnerships and innovation are essential to pave the way forward.

Kevin Hall, editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a nonprofit organization with a presence across Latin America, explained how his organization fights organized crime through an information network. 

Investigations such as NarcoFiles have brought together journalists from different countries. OCCRP also provides cybersecurity training and has developed partnerships that go beyond traditional journalistic collaborations — including, Hall said, one to create a video game that brings investigative reporting to new audiences.

Daniel Molina, founder and director of Revista Concolón in Panama, spoke about the importance of telling a community’s stories from within and experimenting with different formats. Since its launch, the magazine has created new products, including comics, podcasts and special investigations.

Community engagement and collaboration are also central to Puente News Collaborative, its founder, Alfredo Corchado, said. The organization works with a network of 14 independent journalists based in different communities and on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Puente News also seeks to strengthen local newsrooms by offering funding to other journalists and news organizations.

Strengthening local journalism was also a key goal for Clavel Rangel Jiménez, co-founder of the Amazon Journalism Network. The organization supports journalists in small communities across Brazil’s Amazon region, where corruption, organized crime, violence against journalists and illegal economic activities make reporting challenging.

To address these challenges, the network offers mentoring and workshops designed to expand journalists’ skills and strengthen trust within their communities. The network currently has 68 journalists and has supported the publication of more than 50 stories, Jiménez said.

Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, spoke about her organization’s work training journalists across Latin America in solutions journalism and promoting sustainability models that combine sponsorships for local journalists, audience revenue and philanthropy.

Rosenberg said solutions journalism can help rebuild audience trust at a time when many people have chosen to avoid the news altogether. The challenge, she said, is to produce stories that are “more powerful with more hope.”

AI challenges and opportunities

Journalists across Ibero-America are also experimenting with new tools, formats and products to produce relevant stories that connect with their audiences.

In Mexico, Roberto Rock, founder and director of La Silla Rota, one of the country’s leading news sites, spoke about the outlet’s efforts to develop artificial intelligence tools that small and midsize newsrooms can use.

One of them, La Morninguera, summarizes Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily news conferences — known as las Mañaneras — to help reporters identify the most relevant topics. In partnership with technology consultancy firm 7Gats, the outlet also developed a tool that identifies the topics trending on social media and makes them available to its journalists.

Ramón Zamora, an anthropologist and sociologist with the Central American Independent Media Archive, shared his experience using AI tools to expand the investigative capabilities of journalists working with large amounts of information.

Zamora said he used Claude to develop code that enabled an AI agent to review hundreds of pages of public information provided by the Guatemalan government as part of investigations into state corruption. He said the tool allowed him to “go from suspicions to facts” when investigating specific individuals.

The use of these tools raised a fundamental question about the future of the profession: How can journalists be prepared to work with artificial intelligence without losing the skills and principles that define journalism?

During the panel “Teaching Artificial Intelligence to Journalism Students: Challenges and Opportunities,” Alessandra de Falco, a professor at the Federal Universities of São João del Rei and Mato Grosso do Sul, said AI is already present in virtually every field, including journalism.

Students, she added, need to learn how to use these tools, program with them, verify information, protect data and establish clear boundaries for their use in journalism.

That need for preparation also extends to newsrooms. During a panel on artificial intelligence and disinformation, participants said AI is making disinformation more sophisticated and allowing it to spread more quickly — from written content to manipulated images and deepfake videos.

Colloquium participants shared examples of how some newsrooms are using AI to address some of the same problems the technology is exacerbating. Wendy Selene Pérez, a journalist with Factchequeado, said she uses tools such as Google’s reverse image search to verify the origin of photographs and programs designed to detect deepfakes in text, images and interviews.

Participants also emphasized that journalists must help their audiences understand how AI works and what its risks are, particularly as disinformation becomes increasingly widespread.

Given the scale of these challenges, Fernanda Camarena, a journalist and professor at the Poynter Institute, highlighted the lack of preparedness in many newsrooms.

“What worries me is how unprepared we are as news organizations,” she said. “We have all the good intentions, but we don’t know how to communicate them and we don’t know how to have conversations with our teams.”