What a Google Scholar Search can Do for You
In 1998 El Faro started off as an online medium for independent news, after 12 years of civil war in El Salvador as the country was left to pick up after its ruins. According to ReVista, a Harvard publication on Latin American issues, El Faro’s first crew of reporters were young, inexperienced, and straight out of college.
Carlos Dada, founder and director, wrote in ReVista “ Because of our lack of resources to start a print medium — rather than a visionary perspective — El Faro began as an Internet operation. We had no money to pay reporters. Also, since the Internet at the time was almost nonexistent in a poor country like El Salvador, it took us a while to earn a place among Salvadoran media.”
El Faro is now well-known as an investigative media outlet across El Salvador and internationally. Their views and reporting reflect a left-ist ideology that keeps the government accountable and upholds an anti-authoritarian state of mind. A quick look at the website shows a couple of headlines that direct themselves towards the government while giving a voice for a neglected communities, such as an article that reads the LGBTQ Federation is calling out the abandonment sexual diversity in the new government.

A Google Scholar search then led to different avenues of El Faro and their reporting. For example, an article entitled “ The Transformation of El Salvador’s Gangs into Political Actors” by Douglas Farah wrote that when El Faro broke a story about secret negotiations between rival gangs but denied by the government to form a political truce was met with backlash, calling the story as “false” and “slanderous” and the editors received death threats from gang members.
Another research study looking at the sustainability of Latin American Investigative Non-Profits, noted that other news outlets like El Faro rely heavily on foreign funding and their social media accounts to direct traffic. Like El Faro, their strengths are met through in-depth, feature reporting with elements of literary journalism — but their uniqueness is that their staff is made up of a few experienced editors and the rest fresh reporters.
Interestingly enough, Google Scholar revealed two studies conducted in different universities in El Salvador by journalism students, one looking into how La Prensa and El Diario de Hoy covered the management of San Salvador by Nayib during 2015 to 2017. The other article looked at the messages of Nayib Bukele from March to August in 2016, analyzing his political and social messages both on social media, through press releases and other forms of communication. Looking at these studies demonstrates a) a look into the work journalism students are doing in El Salvador and b) how that reflects what El Faro does and the kind of reporters they could hire c) and the level of criticism that is being translated from a university level to an organization regarding the most important topics.
Ultimately, I will take these searches and apply them to my senior project to provide contextual background of El Faro’s beginnings, the backlash they receive for their work, how people view their work in and outside of El Salvador, and how they execute their work turning a critical eye to Nayib, gangs and other issues in El Salvador that finds its way back to readers L.A.
