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Carlos Eduardo Huertas, NF’12

Carlos Eduardo Huertas (right) participates in a panel discussion at the Freedom of the Press in Latin America Conference at Harvard.

Thanks to the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the 2012 Knight Latin American Nieman Fellows – journalists Carlos Eduardo Huertas from Colombia and Claudia Méndez Arriaza from Guatemala – were given the opportunity to do fieldwork immediately after their time at Harvard: two months to pursue the many ideas and plans they made while on campus. Carlos share his fieldwork report below.

A Step Forward

Since the beginning of my Nieman Fellowship, my main concern was figuring out how to design a platform to produce quality journalism about Latin America. Following numerous discussions with my fellow Nieman colleagues, in Cambridge's classrooms and cafés, I was bursting with ideas. But there were multiple challenges: how to come up with a plan that would be of interest beyond national borders; how to find a way to make this kind of journalism project sustainable; and finally, how to distribute the resulting product to a broad community throughout Latin America. Surmounting these challenges would be a considerable step forward in the realization of my initial plan.

Thus was born CONNECTAS, a nonprofit journalism project that promotes the production, exchange and the dissemination of information with a transnational perspective on key issues for development in the Americas.

The first issue to address was that of working with transnational agenda. “Does such a thing exist?” I was asked with extreme skepticism by an expert in project evaluation. I explained that this is perhaps one of the most exciting prospects for Latin America. Not only does the region share a common language, traditions, and history, but in recent years, democracy has flourished in most of the countries and citizens increasingly are demanding reliable information to use in their decision making.

Furthermore, since 2004, economic growth in the region has been better than the world average, and even higher than the United States. In addition, initiatives for integrating markets are on the rise, as well as joint projects by governments. Finally, the media in Latin America have focused excessively on what happens in the countries' capital cities, and report very little about what is going on countrywide, much less what is happening around the continent. All of this translates into opportunities for a journalism project such as the one I proposed.

I started by selecting a topic in keeping with CONNECTAS' premise: a transnational issue that is key for development. The kind of issues that I am interested in exploring concern infrastructure, technology, energy, the environment and telecommunications – fields in which much is going on and that could bring real and massive changes to the region, but about which little has been written.

This led me to do a report on the recently opened highway that crosses the Amazon, making it easier for Brazil, the world's sixth largest economy, to access the Pacific Ocean. This is the foremost roadwork project of its kind out of nearly 100 similar projects in the region, but it had not been covered widely by the media. In addition to reporting on its history, I wanted to travel to the area to show the social and environmental impact of this mega-project.

To get a feel for the level of interest that this kind of project might generate, I set up a crowdfunding campaign. This tool not only confirmed that interest to learn about these kinds of issues exists, but also made it possible to explore funding alternatives.

The exercise was successful. The target amount established for a 20-day campaign was achieved by day 15, and the total collected was 15 percent more than projected. It was interesting to note that of the 73 backers, nearly half are Latinos, judging by their surnames. This is key because in the future, CONNECTAS aims to use demographic information to establish a platform in the United States to promote independent journalism in the Americas.

Another valuable result of this effort was the interest the project raised, attracting people such as documentary filmmaker Thomas Moll-Rocek, who was inspired to travel to the area and contribute his work on the project. We traveled together from Peru to Brazil, crossing through Bolivia, and entered the Amazon, recording the many stories that we encountered on our way.

A project of this nature makes it necessary to use a variety of different information sources to provide coverage in a short time and with limited resources. As such, we designed a strategy to work with allies, such as the Infos (Información Sensible) journalism website in Peru, and other sources such as the South American Project (SAP), an initiative of the Harvard School of Architecture, and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA). The result was a joint effort by media, academia and think tanks.

To present the final results of this report, we designed a multimedia module on the CONNECTAS website. The challenge was to offer the stories in an easy-to-use format that would allow readers to explore the subject at different levels. It was also important to offer the information in the three languages of the Americas: English, Portuguese, and Spanish. That was the birth of "The Jungle Highway."

The next challenge was to publicize the results throughout Latin America. To do this, CONNECTAS contacted several media outlets in the region to query their interest in serving as local partners to publish the story. "The Jungle Highway" was published in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. The results of this strategy have been very interesting. Since its publication, the report has had 352,000 page views by 28,000 different visitors, according to figures from Google Analytics. The interest has been so great that the report has been viewed from 99 countries. Literally half the world!

The experience of this report served to verify several of the premises that were conceived during the Nieman year and that were tested during the period of fieldwork. The results are an encouragement to move forward in developing the CONNECTAS platform; a solid first step on an interesting path that now begins.

Midyear reflections on the Nieman Fellowship

Colombian journalist and 2012 Knight Latin American Nieman Fellow Carlos Eduardo Huertas looks back on his first semester at Harvard University.

February 2012

A Vibrant Time

If one were to define in a word prominent American theater director Peter Sellars, it would be provocative. That quality has characterized his work and was surely one of the reasons he was invited to Harvard’s 375th anniversary celebration as one of the university’s star graduates. His distinctive style was evident in a private meeting with the Nieman Fellows last fall. During a detailed discussion about democracy, he recounted that when the Lumière brothers presented one of the first scenes they had filmed using their new invention, some members of the audience fled in terror upon seeing a train apparently bearing down on them as it arrived in the station. He noted that the Internet today is like cinema at that time. The observation resonated with some of those present, all outstanding journalists, who day after day see colleagues in the media trying to run away from the impact of the digital age.

These are uneasy days in the United States — the mecca of modern journalism. The media, in addition to having to deal with the repercussions of having made all of their content available for free on the Web, are facing a difficult economic climate in which advertisers are bowing out en masse. This is the context in which the 74th class of Nieman Fellows, some of the most accomplished journalists in the world, commenced.

While this is a time of many questions with few answers, at least for now, this is also a vibrant time. And a time in which Lippmann House, the Nieman headquarters, plays a special role. A dozen journalists of different nationalities and a similar number of U.S. journalists are sharing ideas on an ongoing basis, discussing why they do what they do, the passions that move them, their dreams, and their concerns about the future of the profession. It is an intense experience, working with a group of journalists in an environment charged with special energy.

The debate about how society gets its information is being addressed in many different departments at Harvard. At least this has been my experience in the different classes I have taken at the Business School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at MIT. Regardless of whether the courses are on international relations, business, literature, or the complexity of human relations, the same concerns are being raised time and again. These include the questions: What is the true impact that social networks will have on journalism? What is the public’s new role in helping to produce information on a mass scale? Is there a sustainable business model for producing quality journalism? How is the profession changing with the arrival of new startups and new practices such as WikiLeaks?

This is a time when newsrooms appear divided between those who only believe in the kind of journalism that has previously existed (with the traditional ways of reporting and the usual business model for financing) and those who are betting on what could be (using computers for investigations, analysis and information dissemination, sustained by not-for-profit business models).

This debate is an opportunity for the different Nieman Fellows to contribute their experiences and to revitalize the diverse Harvard community’s interest in the subject, which would no doubt begin to produce some possible answers. It is significant, one of my co-fellows noted, that this university has been around longer than the United States itself and is the leading academic institution in the world in a number of fields.

Harvard is a universe in which you discover something new every day, whether through chatting with a classmate who comes from the other side of the world, in the intense intellectual debates in the classrooms, or in exploring the far reaches of the seemingly endless campus. It is a place where impossibilities (such as those apparently facing journalism today), give way to possibilities, inviting the students to explore and work hard to support these ideas. Only a place like this could boast a student such as Barack Obama as editor of its Law Review (to name but one of dozens of leaders who have passed through these halls), or Mark Zuckerberg as an intern at the Center for Latin American Studies (another of the hundreds of successful entrepreneurs who studied on this campus).

The interesting thing about the press crisis in America is that it has revealed the weaknesses of the industry and refocused attention on the profession’s reasons for being. On the one hand, it has forced journalists to get involved in the business of media, something that for years was left to the business owners whose only criterion for assessing whether things were good or bad was the bottom line.

On the other hand, society has become increasingly proactive in its demands on the profession. For example, at one of the Nieman seminars, Professor Michael Sandel, noted for his writings on justice, underlined the commitment to truth as the profession’s guiding value. This is completely in keeping with the Nieman Foundation's mission to raise the standards of journalism. When asked about the apparent schism in the newsrooms, Georg Mascolo, editor-in-chief of the German weekly Der Spiegel, said he did not know about an old way and a new way to exercise this profession — he only knew one way, which is to produce good journalism. And that is precisely the specialty of the Nieman experience.

Carlos Eduardo Huertas is an editor investigations editor at Revista Semana. At Harvard, he studed how to design a journalism center to produce transnational investigations about Latin America. As a 2012 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Latin American Nieman Fellow, he onducted a fieldwork project supported by Knight at the end of the academic year.

In November 2011, Carlos participated in a conference on Freedom of the Press in Latin America co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.??

Nieman Fellowships for Latin American journalists in the 2011-2012 academic year were supported by a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Nieman Foundation values the long relationship it has had with the Knight Foundation in educating journalism leaders who work throughout Latin America.