El Faro: The alternative media that crosses borders
El Faro, the first digital periodical in Latin America, emerged after the truce of a 12-year long civil war between the leftist guerilla army and the rightist government in El Salvador. Journalists were used to reporting under a repressive regime. A new generation of reporters were left with the job to start a new medium, one that was fresh, fair and honest. Today, it’s known internationally for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics, organized crime, migration and other themes.
With a staff of only 23 editors and reporters, the Salvadoran news publication holds powerful institutions accountable.
Carlos Dada, co-founder of the publication, wrote that when the Internet started taking off, he and his partner didn’t listen to others who would tell them keep their content short and simple.
“Somehow our stubbornness paid off…El Faro started to earn respect, prestige, and many more readers. We can attribute this success to publishing articles that others preferred to ignore, revealing facts the government tried to keep hidden and running stories about powerful people nobody else dared to touch,” Dada wrote for ReVista in April 2011, a Harvard publication.
The Salvadoran news outlet crosses transnational borders, reaching a different kind of community that follows the independent medium.
El Faro’s critical coverage of the different Salvadoran governments has portrayed itself as an independent and alternative type of media. A 2016 report under the journal Digital Journalism by researcher Summer Harlow and others, finds that media that identifies itself as community media, activist media, grassroots media, and not mainstream can be classified as alternative. El Faro demonstrates these characteristics, labeling itself as a media that advocates for free speech, democracy and free from political or economic power, which Harlow points out are key components of identifying media as alternative and independent.
As an independent publication, El Faro receives it’s support from foreign funding, mainly from private donors. Yet a small portion does come from a membership that allows their members to be updated on projects through newsletters and be a part of a community that interchanges ideas and has their questions answered. These types of revenue fund El Faro’s investigations but also prevents any economic barrier from their readers to reach the publication’s content.
El Faro has grown from being the first digital native media to a platform that partners with big names in the U.S. Since then, the publication has paired with The New York Times in 2016 to cover the presence of Salvadoran gangs in the U.S and with Univision in 2017 to create multimedia packages on caravan migrants. The digital periodical covers issues across Central America and as published in World Policy Journal, El Faro has stood out for its online journalism, as it won an award for publishing an online magazine story about an anthropologist who digs up bodies killed from gang violence.
Historically, the biggest barrier for El Faro is that their digital platform is inaccessible to many Salvadorans who do not have access to the Internet. According to Our World In Data, there are about 1.8 billion Internet users in El Salvador, compared to a total population of 6.4 billion, as reported from World Bank.
However, according to Sanz, El Faro has over 2 million readers, with an influx of readers coming from social media. Their Twitter account has over 474,000 followers, followed closely by 407,000 followers on Facebook and 201,000 followers on Instagram.
Sanz explained that El Faro uses social media to do breaking news coverage, but saves the reporting for articles to be posted later on their web with the full story.
He says that social media has sped up distributing content and accessing different readers. The biggest challenge they face, like other online publications, is that a portion of their readers come from their social media platforms who receive only fragments of their stories.
“People are less conscious if the work is balanced because not all readers have a whole view of the story,” said Sanz.
Another significant minority of their readers, 16 to 17%, live in the U.S. After the civil war of the 1980s, approximately 2.1 million Salvadoran’s migrated to the U.S. The majority of Central Americans, especially Salvadorans, settled in California, Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia and Texas where El Faro’s readership can be traced to.
Over 431,000 of Salvadorans live in California, according to Migration Policy Institute. In the San Fernando Valley, there are 323,210 Central Americans, with over 70,000 Salvadorans, according to Census Reporter.
At California State University, Northidge, students and professors from Latin American backgrounds have shared what they notice about El Faro’s work.
Yarazeth Tapia, 28, a broadcast journalism student, has said that she was introduced to El Faro by professor Jose Luis Benavidez as part of reading material for their class on border reporting. She had read a story of a transgender woman leaving El Salvador because of the discrimination she faced, a story done in partnership with Univison. Tapia enjoyed their in-depth reporting, she said, along with the multimedia components of audio for readers to listen to the story and the video interviews of other caravan migrants.
Once she saw their social media handles at the bottom of their articles, Tapia started following El Faro on Instagram and likes how “vibrant” and “colorful” the posts are.
“The type of pictures they put up, I think that people can identify with it and if they can’t identify with it then they can get educated,” said Tapia.
She says that El Faro is a 100% approachable to a young generation, adjusting well to the needs of the millenial’s and Gen Z during the digital era.
As a student journalist, she says she looks at El Faro as an example of how to tell a story with multiple characters, as they feature authorities, community leaders and members in their stories.
Douglas Carranza, department chair of Central American studies at CSUN, sees that El Faro has a select audience when producing their stories.
“I think El Faro looks for a sophisticated audience, it’s not for everyone, but for a group that can influence politics and culture,” said Carranza.
Dada did write in ReVista that when El Faro started, the messages were directed for people who could make change for the society through their power.
Even so, as El Faro’s mission is to remain as neutral as possible, some readers disagree. Carranza notices that El Faro’s reporting leans more leftist, but so does my dad, Rafael Moran.
My dad found El Faro once he had access to the Internet. He said he found La Prensa and El Diario, national Salvadoran newspapers, then El Faro. He had been reading El Faro for 3 to 5 years and saw that El Faro was an uncensored newspaper that did not write for the rightist regime.
“They talked about all the realities that the people knew but that would not be talked about over TV, newspapers or in other media, because they were rightists,” he said.
Eventually he noticed that El Faro would not criticize much of the leftist party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, because after the civil war, the party had failed to uphold it’s promises to the people and instead created more economic benefits for the upper class. That’s when he started questioning their objectivity and saw that El Faro was more biased than it presented itself to be.
“Ninety percent of Salvadorans are against the leftist and the rightist regime. We want a change and El Faro pertains to the left, not to the change,” he said.
Sanz says that over the years, El Faro has received backlash from their readers, because a lot of the times their reporting is against the majority opinion on the government. He says that their job is to be transparent with their readers and to always question each government and their power.
“Hay temas que nuestros lectores no reciben bien…El buen periodismo incomoda a los lectores. El buen periodismo no dice a sus lectores todo lo que quieren oir. Les dicen tambien la verdad que tambien no quieren escuchar”- There’s themes that our readers do not receive well…The good journalism makes their readers uncomfortable. The good journalism does not tell their readers what they want to hear. It tells them the truth and what they don’t want to hear, said Sanz.
