In the battle to save the Amazon Rainforest, journalists are expanding their address book.
Finding, meeting and earning the trust of important people inside important issues who can give important information is the job of reporters everywhere. But in recent years, journalists in the Amazon and the independent news outlets they write for have been rethinking who those important people are, where they can be found and what the relationships with them should look like.
These journalists argue that traditional reporting about the Amazon has relied too heavily on the voices of government officials and influential corporations and that the perspectives of the marginalized communities protecting much of the forest, including Indigenous people, river communities and quilombos (settlements historically established by runaway slaves), have been completely neglected. They argue that this gap in reporters’ source networks leads the news media to portray the region and its marginalized groups in inaccurate and stereotypical ways and to ignore the gravest problems facing the region and its people.
The independent news outlets that have arisen in the Amazon over the last decade have sought to expand their source networks beyond centers of power to build relationships with marginalized communities, enabling their journalists to reveal unreported human rights abuses and wrongdoing and in doing so, help bring about change.
“We do journalism,” said Elaíze Farias, co-founder of Amazônia Real, a pioneer among these independent news outlets. “Our main goal is to talk about the same subject in a different way, listening to all those people who often were not heard at all about issues that affected them,” said.
These news outlets have developed an expansive network of close relationships with communities who are on the front lines of the battle to preserve the Amazon, giving their journalists exclusive access to some of the region’s most critical stories, including stories of environmental destruction, human rights abuses and corruption. When these communities suffer a land invasion or climate emergency or find a gold mining raft in their local river, for example, the reporters are some of the first to find out.
“The people within the Indigenous villages, the riverside communities, they send me these tips,” said Nicoly Ambrioso, a reporter at Amazônia Real, who said she stays in constant contact with these communities even when she’s not working on a related story. “Speaking with them and writing stories about these topics, we end up creating somewhat of a relationship.”
Given the absence of a platform for many of these communities to voice their demands and the lack of government presence in many areas of the Amazon, reporters occupy a critical role in sharing these stories with the world. In many cases, the articles actively put pressure on the authorities to solve a crisis they had little idea was happening or cared little about.
That was the case in Catarina Barbosa’s story about a community in Anapu, Pará where a school was burned down by land invaders. The government originally had the community’s kids attend a different school miles away instead of rebuilding it, but soon after the publication of Barbosa’s story, which relied on the accounts of several members of the community, the municipal government arrived to rebuild the one-room wood structure.
Tangible impact also came from Amazônia Vox’s reporting about prenatal care in river communities, which led to a bill introduced in the state legislature of Pará to give priority to women from these communities in the state’s health system. The independent outlet, based in Belém, was born with the intention of increasing the representation of local and marginalized voices in reporting about the Amazon. On its website, Amazonia Vox operates an Amazonian source bank, listing the contact information of hundreds of experts and community leaders in the Amazon for other journalists to draw upon as sources. Daniel Nardin, founder of Amazônia Vox, said the intention is to “generate connection and encourage greater participation of local voices in the narratives that are produced about our region.”
But journalists say that building sources among local populations requires more than just having their contact information. It often takes time and care for journalists to develop these relationships with marginalized people, many of whom haven’t had positive experiences with the media.
“It bothered me deeply to be reporting a story and hear people say to me, ‘But are you really going to write what I’m saying? Because the last journalist who came here, he put a lot of things in the article that I didn’t say,’” said Barbosa.
To overcome such mistrust demands taking a careful approach that includes asking for explicit permission to enter communities and explaining to people exactly what the purpose of the reporting is.
“You must always be transparent about your intentions, the objective of your reporting and what benefits can come from it,” Farias said. Sometimes it means cultivating relationships for months before an on-the-record interview actually occurs, like when Farias spoke with a community in the Javari Valley region for almost a year prior to traveling to the territory to report a story.
It also means understanding that many people have very limited experience of dealing with the media and might even speak a different language or dialect, Farias said, adding that journalists have to be sensitive and understanding of those challenges.
“I write for people, with people and about people. That’s why, when I meet someone who doesn’t know how to read or reads little, I record the article I wrote in audio and send it via WhatsApp,” Barbosa said.
Reporters also must be patient with people who might only have limited windows in which they have access to the internet or time away from their work to speak to a journalist. “If you arrive in a territory or speak to a person from a traditional culture, you first have to have the respect of really being sensitive to that person's reality,” Ambrioso said.
This patience on the part of reporters is worth it, they say, not only because building relationships with marginalized communities gives them valuable and exclusive information about the most important crises occurring in the Amazon. But also, including the different forms of knowledge and ways of seeing the world that these sources have is fundamental to a journalist’s mission and responsibility of understanding an issue from all perspectives. This is especially true in the Amazon, where experts and environmental advocates say non-Western ways of understanding and treating the forest are critical to the region’s preservation.
“We value the knowledge of the Amazonian populations,” said Farias. “That is, the knowledge of non-Western science, indigenous science, indigenous philosophy. These local intellectuals have the knowledge and authority to speak on various issues of our time, but they are often overlooked.”
Reporting the Understory