Share
This update is available in Spanish and Portuguese.
As part of the Together for Conservation project, Internews (through the South America team of the Americas Program Unit and Earth Journalism Network) aims to improve the media’s capacity to safely produce accurate and in-depth coverage of environmental issues in the Amazon region and expose the transnational environmental crimes that are rampant in the region, highlighting their impacts on the ecosystem and the well-being of Indigenous peoples and local communities in the Amazon.
We are pleased to announce our first cohort of media grantees, who we selected from 82 applications on the strengths of their proposals to train local journalists to produce stories exposing the threats to biodiversity and sustainable livelihoods caused by illegal logging, unsustainable fishing, wildlife trafficking, illegal mining and more in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil.
The four media organizations selected are:
- (((o)))eco, to promote knowledge interchanges between young communicators from the Amazon and the Atlantic Rainforest in Brazil.
- El Foco, to train Indigenous journalists and communicators from the Peruvian Amazon to cover illegal wildlife trafficking.
- Rutas del Conflicto, to assist indigenous communities from the Colombian Amazon to produce stories related to carbon credits.
- Youtopía and Consorcio de Comunicación por la Sostenibilidad, to train and produce investigative, solutions-driven stories and build a network of Ecuadorian Amazon journalists.
These grantees will receive between $13,000 and $15,000 to develop projects lasting up to five months that will strengthen the capacities of their organizations and the journalists in their networks to produce high-quality, factual, and engaging public information on the impacts of conservation crimes, their links with climate change, and viable solutions to mitigate and respond to these impacts. Besides funding, organizations will also receive support from Internews when developing and carrying out their project activities, and recording the impacts they achieve.
These media grants are part of the Together for Conservation Project, in partnership with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Internews and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). This project aims to strengthen the capacities of civil society actors and their regional networks to conserve biodiversity and prevent environmental crimes in the Amazon. Our goal for these grants is to improve the quantity and quality of coverage (especially investigative reporting) on these issues.
“The selected proposals are inspiring as they will enable dozens of local journalists and communicators to receive training to publish insightful reporting from their perspectives in wide-reaching media outlets,” says Stefano Wrobleski, Amazon Program Officer at Internews. “We expect this support to contribute to more journalists from the Amazon region and media outlets that cover it being able to expose the environmental threats that impact the forest and those who live off it.”
This project is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of Internews and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.
Look out for more information about the projects led by the selected organizations on the EJN website in the coming months.
Banner image: The Opisthocomus hoazin is a species of bird found in the Amazon and the Orinoco basins / Credit: Diego Lizcano via Flickr.
