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MEDIA: Sustainable Development in a Doomed City

Mario Osava

CARTAGENA, Colombia, Nov 24 2008 (IPS) - The sea encroaching on the streets of this Caribbean resort city in northern Colombia dramatically underlines the challenges that 60 journalists, winners of awards from the Latin American Avina foundation, discussed over the weekend.

The award money is to be used for reporting or making documentaries on sustainable development.

In spite of the lack of rain or other exceptional circumstances, some 50 metres of the street were under water in front of the Almirante Estelar Hotel, where the 2nd Meeting of Investigative Journalism for Sustainable Development, sponsored by Avina, was being held.

Two participants at the meeting were unable to visit the historic centre of the city on the morning of Nov. 21. The avenue they had to take from the hotel’s Bocagrande neighbourhood was flooded with water and impassable for cars.

Cartagena appears doomed to be one of the first victims of the rise in ocean levels due to global warming.

The lowest-lying streets of Bocagrande, a narrow strip of land covered with tall buildings and modern hotels that projects into the sea, are already under water when the tide is in.

This did not curb the enthusiasm of the award-winners at the end of the forum, on Nov. 22, at which they were able to discuss their projects and listen to experts invited by Avina and Casa Daros, which joined the initiative, adding a category on art and education.

Avina foments alliances between social organisations and the business community, to design environmentally-friendly development models.

It was “very good to know that utopia is not dead, and that there are people who are still thinking about changing the world,” said Puerto Rican filmmaker José Emilio Gonzáles Matos, known as “Chemu”.

Gonzáles Matos was given his award to complete a documentary film about popular theatre in relation to the struggle for Puerto Rican national independence.

“It’s very easy to write about disasters and catastrophes. What’s difficult, afterwards, is to cover possible solutions or opportunities,” said 76-year-old Colombian journalist Javier Darío Restrepo, author of several books on professional ethics.

In his presentation, Restrepo highlighted the principle of caring as a factor in sustainability and good journalism.

He recommended working “with roots in the present and in future consequences,” in order “to stimulate hope.” The projects of the award winners, in his view, reflect the vitality of “the journalism that makes proposals and seeks solutions” in Latin America.

This was the second edition of the Investigative Journalism Awards that Avina promotes every two years. Sixty-one projects were selected for funding, and between them they will receive a total of 250,000 dollars for their implementation.

Eleven of them are in the areas of art and education, and are being supported by Daros Latinamerica, a Swiss institution that set up Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, devoted to the dissemination of contemporary art in the region.

Sustainable development is based on a three-pronged foundation formed by “caring, faith in the future and hope,” said Jaime Abello, head of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI), based in Cartagena.

The FNPI supports the Avina initiative, along with another 10 national or international journalism organisations in the Americas and Europe.

Abello warned journalists about the risks of sensational reporting of tragic events, and also of glossing over problems to give a rosy view. He advocated information about events that do not dwell only on complaints and tragedies, but neither only on good news without including the risks, challenges and context around them.

Ethics and sustainable human development are a question “of viewpoint,” said Geraldinho Vieira, vice president of the Brazilian News Agency for Children’s Rights (ANDI).

Vieira emphasised the importance of “a journalism in which everyone is heard” and reporters are constantly asking themselves whether they are contributing “to broadening the concept of democracy.”

Fernando Alonso, associate director of the FNPI, presented the results of a study on corporate social responsibility in media outlets belonging to 37 groups in 13 Latin American countries.

He said that the goal of these companies is to achieve social, economic and environmental impacts, although few of them include social responsibility in their business strategies, labour practices and management.

Meanwhile, Patrick Busquet of the French organisation Reporters d’Espoirs (Reporters of Hope) introduced the proposal of “solution-based journalism.”

“Journalism should serve the common good and should contribute solutions,” he said. The point is not just to obtain “financial results” for the media company; it is also necessary “to measure the impact of the news,” he said.

Journalism connects human beings, and should serve “all those involved, individually and collectively, as well as organisations that are acting for the common good,” Busquet said.

The journalists at Cartagena, representing 57 projects that were award recipients, divided up into five groups to evaluate their proposals, exchange ideas and establish cooperation networks.

The Art and Education group decided to create a blog to expand cooperation, support their different tasks along the way, and possibly add information from other countries to their articles and documentaries.

Many similarities emerged, and “we learned a lot from the comments and the projects of the others in the group,” said Cristina de León, from the Philippines, who lives in Colombia and plans to investigate the impact of a music school that trains violinists in low-income communities in Cali.

Ana Caistor Arendar, from Britain, was delighted to have met “so many journalists who think alike.” Now, she said, she has even more energy for writing an article about a centre that taught photography and created a photographic agency in a low-income community in Guatemala.

The meeting “encouraged hope” by showing “art as a platform for education,” said María Caridad Cumaná González, the head of the Cuban portal Cine Latinoamericano.

But it also “obliges us to reflect about journalism and its ethics,” said Lorena Fuentes Cannobio, from Chile, who is interested in educational aspects of theatre for children.

From the group discussing climate change, Edison Duvan of Colombia, a correspondent for the Ecuadorean newspaper La Hora on the border with his country, emphasised the importance of exchanging experiences from all over the continent, with its “contrasts and weaknesses.”

Simona Norberto, of the Red Amazonia television network, who plans to make a video about the social, environmental and cultural impact of the highways between Brazil and the Pacific ocean, said she was happy to cease “feeling like an island in Rondonia,” the Amazonian state where she lives and works.