How Entrepreneurial Journalists Engage the LATAM Audience
By Ema Jimenez
When it comes to Latin American countries, one major and key difference between our friends to the South and the United States, is the freedom of the press.
Before any news media start up can begin, it is vital they understand how certain Latin countries treat the media, who owns them, and who are they trying to reach. Many Journalists in these countries are often getting threats, kidnapped or even killed for uncovering scandals involving corruption or simply trying to advocate for basic human rights.
In Inflection Point by Sembra Media, they state,“More than 20% of the founders and directors we interviewed admitted that they avoided covering certain topics, people, and institutions because of threats and intimidation.”
I come from a country where thankfully, today, the press is free and can cover sensitive topics and criticize their government, but it wasn’t always the case.
In Chile, during the regime of Augosto Pinochet, he controlled the press and had people murdered for going against him. Sadly, till this day there are several Latin American countries that suffer under these controls, depriving the people of the truth. As Entrepreneurial Journalists continue to venture out to Latin American countries it is crucial they understand and value the rules of such countries, for their own safety.
According to the research in Inflection, the audience in Latam varies from readers to podcast listeners, and “age is not the controlling factor when it comes to audience aggregation.”
What really matters to their audience is the content that’s being produced and its accessibility. One thing I felt would work well with our group's pain point, is forming hyperlocal sites for underserved communities, “Hyperlocal news organizations provide information unavailable anywhere else.” Like in the U.S., we have many outlets covering the bigger stories, and smaller issues affecting the community are often overlooked.
Many of these underserved communities never had local papers so entrepreneurs might be hesitant to do a startup in such a way because they feel they won’t attract as much advertising to generate revenue. However, because they are reporting on a smaller scale they don’t need much and can reach out to their own community for support and work with a small team or have contributors on a volunteer basis, as suggested in the Sembra Media’s research. Too often we’re looking for the bigger story, the scandalous one, that we forget the people and issues that matter the most, the ones in our very own backyard, that are the backbone to these countries.
