Imani Henrick: Hello and welcome back to season three of the Survive and Thrive podcast.  

On this episode, we are looking at what it takes for independent public interest media to evolve in a world where journalism is tested every single day across the globe. Newsrooms are closing, trust is shrinking, and the space where citizens once met to understand their societies are disappearing. Today, we’re diving into the growing phenomenon of news deserts: communities where there is no reliable local journalism at all.  

When these gaps emerge, people are pushed towards social media for information; politicians communicate unchecked, and disinformation spreads with no one to debunk it. As a result, public conversation becomes polarized, and the democratic fabric weakens.

Our guest today is Izabela Moi, Executive Director at Agência Mural in Brazil. Welcome, Izabela!  

Izabela Moi: Thank you for having me and for having an interest in hearing what we have been going through. Agência Mural is a non-profit local news organization founded in 2010. We work with underprivileged communities in the metropolitan area of São Paulo, the largest in South America. It’s an urban agglomeration of 39 cities and where 85% of the population are low-income families. These communities are news deserts or are almost news deserts. 

Henrick: I was browsing your website, and there’s content translated to English there. And you call it journalism for and by the peripheries. Why does Brazil need a media outlet like Agência Mural?

Moi: I have 30 years of professional experience now. I’ve worked in mainstream newspapers. And what we understood at the time that started – we started as a blog – was that we were reporting only about the financial and political center and those who occupy it.  

We did not include stories about low-income communities, which are at the peripheries of our cities but form the majority. We do not include their stories or their narratives in the mainstream narrative of the city. And it's still like that today. Of course, today, Agência Mural is not alone anymore. There are other smaller collectives and organizations that are doing the same work – not only in São Paulo, but across the country. But it's still a struggle to not only depict these communities as the center of violence or the center of poverty. We are trying to change that and really show that there are citizens living there who pay their taxes and need attention from local governments and local businesses. 

We have a small full-time team of around 13 people, and then we have a network of what we call local correspondents of 70 people living in the neighborhoods that report for us. I am the only one who doesn’t come from the periphery. That's a rule in our organization: Everyone lives in one of those communities that we serve. That changed the perspective of our work on a daily basis.

But do you have life experience from there? Can you tell me what life looks like in the peripheries, especially when it comes to freedom of speech and journalism? 

Imagine you live in an area where the whole narrative and the whole information flow comes from a center where you don't belong and where the reality doesn't match yours. 

Before Mural and other collectives, the only stream of information that we had produced about those areas was about the violence that existed and still exists. We don’t deny that. Or it was about religious groups putting out their narratives. 

In this situation, people do not feel that they belong to the same local administration and that they have rights. So, it demobilizes people. It doesn't make them feel that they belong, that their taxes are the same. When information doesn't exist, it disengages you from reality.  

That's interesting and shocking at the same time. What is it that disappears when local news is gone? 

Well, everything. You don't relate to reality. That's the thing. 

São Paulo is made of 39 cities, and ten of them are completely news deserts. And at a smaller level, there’s communities that are news deserts, too.

We recently went to one of the smallest cities that is a news desert. And we spent a week there just before the mayoral elections to see how it went. So, to get information about political candidates, for example, people had to go to church or a bar to talk with people they like or rely on. Another source was the pamphlets distributed by the candidates themselves. 

So, this city has been governed by two families for centuries, and they just swap between the two families one election after another. These families are part of the very small rich center and the whole population. I’d say around 90% of the people is really hijacked by whatever comes from their mouths. They own the only radio station. That’s why we consider this city a news desert.  

So, if you live there, you don't really participate in anything. You just watch. 

And wait for whatever is coming, right? 

Yes. You know, when you don't have information, you don't do anything. You just think you live in a natural order of things: It’s like that and it’s going to be like that. And the only way to change things is to move out. 

Where do people now turn to for information when local journalism has collapsed? You have told me that people go to the bars, to the church. What are the risks that come when people rely mostly on such kind of maybe a few groups of, um, discussions, church and social media as well? 

Social media is a big problem in Brazil – and a good tool, if you know how to use it. 

But the problem is at the same time as the collapse of the media, at least in the Global South; we must talk about the collapse of public education. People are less cultivated and less educated. 

I know illiterate people who have mobile phones and can go to Facebook or Instagram and get their news because it's audio and video. They get their news directly from social media, but because they haven’t had a critical thinking education or just not enough education, they can’t tell if somebody is lying. 

The problem is bigger than the production of disinformation; the public education system is also going to rot. So with the two in crisis at the same time, we are afraid of presidential elections next year. It's really scary. But we cannot talk about journalism without an education system, at least in my country.  

What does the absence of local news do to political accountability, public debates and polarization in city communities? 

I have been thinking about polarization as the lack of dialogue tools. The less educated you are, the less knowledge and information you have of reality, and the more likely you are to become attached to your values and what you think you understand. You know, clichés, jargon, and superficial statements. People cling to those because that's how they feel secure about how to enter a debate or conversation, or even to have a posture in front of reality.  

That's one debate that we journalists are not including in our big crisis: It's not only about the trust of audiences, it's not only about the machine of disinformation, it's also about the collapse of educational systems that does not match our age of information. 

How does your grassroots reporting model help to rebuild trust in communities that have long lived in news deserts? 

We have a small full-time team, 13 people, and 70 correspondents. They live in the neighborhoods they report from. They are residents, they know the community, the neighbors, and the community leaders. They know the problems and the good things. This has been our model from the start. And when you visit our website, you’ll see the team. People know where the correspondents live, that they are not parachuting in, that they are not talking from an outside point of view. 

So, the audience sometimes comes to us with stories, saying “I want you to tell this story or that story.” The first rule in our newsroom handbook is that our first source for any story is not an official one. It's always the people who are living in the territory. That's our priority source. We really tell stories from the point of view of people living in the communities. And it has been this way for 15 years!

I've just thought of Tanzania where we have local media houses but most of them do not really broadcast or share news from the local people, and the audience are always blaming them. You know, "you just broadcast exactly what we hear from national media." So, what kind of information or news do people turn to? 

It really is local news. We have more rules in our editorial handbook. We don't report on violence – because all the mainstream media does. They don’t need more of that. And we don't report on the good deeds of big organizations because that’s always marketing and PR stunts. 

Apart from that, we report everything that happens in the neighborhoods – good or bad. People look to us because they want to see their realities somewhere. And we receive a lot of messages like, “I didn't know there was this theater going on right next to my house, and now I take my kids to it. And if it wasn't for you, we wouldn’t know.”   

This year, we also started working with AI to create a public information database. It’s what we call a little bit of service journalism. It’s about climate change impact information like, for example, the air pollution index by territory and rain risks. We are going to do something like that about public spending by territory, too: trying to break down the information that is public and already available – if you are savvy and can dig on the computer. We’re breaking it down, changing the language and distributing it to the territories so they know more about where they live and they can act. 

During local elections, we publish a list of every candidate and what they have done for their territories. Also a little more service journalism during elections. So, the day before the elections our website goes down because of traffic – it has already happened twice.  

Oh my god. 

Yeah, I hope it won’t this year. We have been reinforcing the website. But this happens because people rely on us and know they can get information without any political bias or anything. 

What's your plan for the coming elections? 

Well, we never ever side with any party or any candidate. We take the side of truth. We try to convey as much truth and facts as we can. 

So, we are working on distribution through WhatsApp and SMS this year to be prepared for next year. And we are in the middle of trying a new thing by enhancing the role of the local correspondents to become more like local influencers and get them closer to their audience through WhatsApp groups. This is a test, I'm not saying any more. 

I'm recording in Tanzania. We have just come through the elections, and we have experienced at least six days of internet shutdown. People could not access anything: internet money, digital payments, communication. People abroad were really struggling to communicate with their families. There were demonstrations happening and journalists were really not able to report what was going on. And this has led now the media houses in Tanzania looking bad because we didn't report exactly what was going on.

How is the situation in Brazil during elections when it comes to freedom of expression, flow of information and internet availability? 

I think that's what we went through with the last president, Bolsonaro. He even tried to block people from going to vote, for example. Journalists were persecuted and threatened, not only in court but in real life. It was really dangerous. But now, we have a democratic president. So, from this point of view, I think it's going to be easier for us. We're going to be able to do our work. 

I'm more afraid of how the misinformation machine is going to work because people earn money from it. You know that platforms are very happy to distribute this kind of speech and misinformation. That’s why right now in Brazil, there’s a lot of discussion on platform regulation and how they will have to behave during elections. 

And there's even a small pocket of people still trying to push the platforms to protect journalism activity. I'm in a group that’s trying to push for public policy that will help sustain the independent journalism industry in Brazil, because we are numerous, but very fragile. We never know if we're going to survive one more year. 

I understand – or I assume – that the places you are working for are not news deserts by chance, and that there are reasons for that. Am I right? And also, with little money available to invest in public interest journalism: How do you even stay viable in this tough environment? 

I don't know, Imani. We are a miracle. Especially because I think we are the most unequal country, at least in Latin America. A small number of people is very, very rich. And then I would say 85% of the people are low-income communities and families.

And of course, people don't want to get information to this audience. That’s what I was saying before: Information makes us able to act. Information gives us agency. Information makes us engage with reality and see that this is not natural. This society is just something that we made up and we can build something different. 

So, our viability is a fight every year. We rely on grants, partnerships, for example, on republishing articles in bigger media. We try to get a model that has many revenue sources. We also ask for contributions from smaller donors that aren’t part of our audience because we cannot ask for subscriptions or put up a paywall – we’re after all fighting information inequality. 

In the long term, I have many dreams and projects, but we can never plan beyond one year.  

You told me that there are other organizations that are doing the same work. Maybe you guys are sharing experiences. How do they thrive?  

We just co-organized the third conference of independent journalists from the periphery and favelas of Brazil. So it was last week in Rio the Janeiro – while in Rio there was the whole thing with the police shooting poor people. I think everybody knows this news. 

So, for three days there were more than 30 organizations similar to ours coming from all of the states of Brazil. Most of them are smaller and more fragile than ours. We were able to fund this conference to exchange experiences and to form a network that is going to try to sustain each other – at least in terms of knowledge, tools exchange and how we can help each other in capacity-building. All big and small cities in Brazil have the same problem: It's only the elite who can pay for information. 

When we look at traditional journalism education, do journalists get to reflect on the gap between peripheries and the rich parts of society? And their own bias in it? Is access to information a topic at universities? 

No, not in Brazil. But we have been increasingly called to give classes or to participate in debates within universities to talk exactly about that. What are we reporting about in a city as big as São Paulo? How do we look at the city? How do we know what is important to report?  

We’ve been reflecting very deeply in the last years about what local journalism is and how it can serve people. And yes, we also talk about access to information and the lack of access to the internet. Ninety percent of our audience is mobile; they don't have internet and computers at home. 

And we also talk about how you feel part of the same city, if you have enough information about it. 

Apart from universities, do journalists really get time to reflect on the gap between peripheries and the rich part of society? 

You know, if you don't come from those areas, no. The syllabus is very technical and centered on how to tell stories. So what most journalists do is look at their lives, their reality and then try to tell it. And if most of the students, or at least at the best universities, come from families that have a higher income, they are not going to look at the peripheries. They think of the periphery as the place where people that work in their houses live. And that's it.  

You just told me that there's no access to information topic in universities. Are those debates you’re invited to enough to prepare responsible journalists for the future? 

For me, invitations are proof that they are changing the way they are thinking, that they know now that something is missing. 

To add one small detail: The local correspondents who come to work for us every year go through a selection where we select 30 people, and we train them in local journalism. The only rules are that they must be at least 18 years old and come from the communities we serve. They spend six months with us, and we train them for free. They learn our editorial line, get the handbooks, the tools, they participate in conversations with journalists or specialists we invite and then do their first story. 

Some of them stay with us, some choose to go away, and they find better jobs. Until now, we’ve trained 700 local journalists. And I think that also is changing the media ecosystem because they go to work in other media and they say, “Hey, there's another kind of story that we can do about São Paulo.” 

That's impressive. Thank you so much, Izabela. A lot to learn from Agência Mural! Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us at Survive and Thrive. Thank you so much! 

This transcript of "Survive and Thrive" has been lightly edited for clarity. 

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