New voices echo through the rainforest announcing the news of the day, which, here in the Amazon, is also the news of the era:
A fire yesterday. An invasion this morning. Partly smoky skies today—rain unlikely.
Scattered throughout the forest, the voices strain to be heard, shouting at the top of their lungs not only the headlines, but also the explanations, investigations and confirmations that might help a passerby better understand the catastrophe happening around them.
In Acre, the western corner of the Brazilian Amazon, the voice is named Varadouro and calls itself “um jornal das selvas”—a jungle newspaper. “Communicate to preserve,” its motto reads and it tells stories with the jungle as setting, character, audience and plot.
On the other side of the forest in Belém, where the Amazon links to the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of the world, other voices have begun telling similar stories. Agência Carta Amazônia chronicles the encroachment of the palm industry into a forest quilombo (a settlement historically established by fugitive slaves) while Amazônia Vox describes the promise of local chocolate production in preserving plant diversity.
From Manaus, where the Rio Negro and Rio Solimões collide in the middle of the forest to form the Amazon River, the voices of Amazônia Real detail the death of Yanomami Indigenous people at the hands of illegal gold miners and Vocativo reveals the Amazonas government’s inaction during the state’s worst drought in decades.
In the river port city of Santarém, Pará, Tapajós de Fato reveals the pollution of waterways by an advancing mining industry. From nearby Altamira, where construction of the third-largest hydroelectric dam in the world has wreaked environmental havoc, Sumaúma tells the story of a young girl unafraid of snakes but terrified of the land invaders who burned down her school.
In São Gabriel da Cachoeira, the municipality with the highest percentage of Indigenous people in Brazil, Rede Wayuri broadcasts over radio, podcast and WhatsApp life-saving fact-checks about COVID-19.
Up north in Boa Vista, Roraima, Correio do Lavrado investigates the advance of sport fishing in the rivers of the Northern Amazon and in Porto Velho, the capital of Rondônia that was smothered with a cloud of smoke earlier this year, Voz da Terra shouts about the human-started fires blazing through Indigenous lands.
Looking at it all from above, InfoAmazônia relies on satellite images and maps to narrate the progression of farmers, ranchers, gold miners, drug dealers and loggers and the retreat of the largest rainforest on earth.
As a group, the voices represent a new age of journalism and communication in the Amazon Rainforest. Over the last decade, recent college graduates, career reporters and community leaders across the Amazon have created websites, podcasts and WhatsApp channels to publish original journalism uninfluenced by the government or corporations. Working in teams of one or two or 10 and relying on grants, donations and the tireless passion of a handful of volunteers, these journalists have taken on a lofty mission: protecting the Amazon Rainforest and its people through rigorous and accurate reporting.
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With vast distances between municipalities, a geography that facilitates the concealing of wrongdoing, a media landscape dominated by government and corporate money and a real and incessant threat of violence against reporters, the Amazon is a difficult place to be a journalist.
But there is also perhaps no other region where rigorous journalism is more important.
Right now, large swaths of previously undisrupted rainforest are burning. Miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers are invading protected lands, clear-cutting rows of jungle, poisoning waterways and killing Indigenous people and other defenders of the forest.
This destruction, together with climate change, as evidenced by a historic drought this year that has sunk rivers to their lowest point in history, is pushing the Amazon and its climate-regulating, carbon-storing and biodiversity-preserving powers to the brink.
The vastness and remoteness of the forest as well as a scarcity of resources and attention dedicated to environmental protection from all levels of government make detecting and combating illegal deforestation and its financial supports difficult. Journalism, therefore, in its ability to reveal wrongdoing and state failures and bring awareness to previously unknown emergencies, could potentially occupy a pivotal role in the fight to protect the forest and its people.
But the financial constraints facing journalism make rigorous and expansive local reporting in the Amazon rare. It is widely known that many of the largest local news outlets, financed primarily by the government and large businesses, lack editorial independence. Their websites are plastered with fast coverage of crimes or annual festivals, while accountability reporting or investigations get published only with creative and careful modifications, their own journalists admit.
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But the new voices in the forest hope to be different.
Focusing on socio-environmental issues, they prioritize the inclusion of sources typically left out of corporate media, building relationships with Indigenous groups, river communities and quilombos. They use traditional and nontraditional means—websites, podcasts, videos, messaging apps and workshops—to attempt to reach a local audience. They reveal unreported invasions and unaddressed calamities, while correcting rampant disinformation and highlighting solutions. Rejecting any potentially controversial funding from the government or corporations, these organizations claim to freely illuminate the illicit activities and government neglect that are fueling the biome’s destruction and which typically remain hidden under the shroud of the forest.
However, almost all of these independent outlets struggle for funding. Many have difficulty gaining the local audience they set out to reach. While a couple have become established operations with considerable support from nonprofits, others are run by one person who reports, writes, edits, designs, posts, advertises and applies for funding, all while working a day job.
In other words, independent journalism in the Amazon is an act of determination, passion and perseverance. It relies on a deep faith that each interview the journalists conduct, each public document they examine, each piece of data they collect could answer some question, prompt some thought or establish some understanding in a reader about the dire threats the Amazon and its people face.
Over the next eight months, I will be posting interviews, articles and analyses about these independent news outlets in the Amazon and the reporting they produce. I will look at the kinds of topics they cover and sources they rely on, the strategies they use to differentiate their journalism and sustain themselves as organizations, and the impact they have.
I hope to highlight the thoughtful and exhausting work these journalists are doing and the powerful role of information in the Amazon region. But I also hope to provide for other journalists an examination of the possibilities and challenges of independent and nonprofit local journalism in an age in which local reporting throughout the world is crumbling. As the success of new, independent outlets in the region suggests, if the Amazon is at the center of the world’s fight against climate change, perhaps it is also the principal battleground for the fate of independent journalism.
Reporting the Understory