I wasn’t part of the team in the early years but I know that since the first stories the website was covering a huge variety of topics, from environmental issues to fashion; from alternative transport to radical sports, from memories of older habitants to the new trends of funk music… It was much richer and more surprising than the coverage that the traditional media could offer up to then. And that was the most exciting, people from outside, from the “asphalt” were very impressed with so much news, so many stories, as if they were discovering new places and cultures, but the favelas had always been there!

The weekly newsroom meeting was like having a masterclass. The story is well told by Christiane Ramalho in her book “Notícias da Favela” (“News from the Favela”). The correspondents, the professional journalists, and social science researchers like anthropologists and sociologists interested in the project would sit together and talk about each topic exchanging the local view of the favela resident, the scholarly view of the guests, and the more “technical” view of the media people, but everyone would bring a citizen perspective too, a “carioca” perspective, but from different parts of the city, different social classes… It was a very special encounter.

The pitched ideas would be discussed there and developed in the following days, then the final text would be written/edited in collaboration by the correspondent and one of the professional journalists. They used to sign together. But with time, many of the correspondents won scholarships and studied Journalism in a private university, so they became professionals as well.

Item descriptionThis is a very important issue, and very contemporary. The right to self-representation, the speech in first person, the self-narrative, the right to speak about a reality which you know by experience, you lived, and not only to give a testimony, but controlling the narrative and owning the “subject position.” This is changing the way the marginalized people and social movements are seen and heard, because the “mainstream” is now starting to listen to them, and opening space for their voices, without so many mediators. Viva Favela was part of this shift in the field of participatory media.

Item descriptionThe photographers were vital to Viva Favela, and they helped to build a prestigious aura, because they were all very good and each one had a unique style, so they were doing photojournalism and art essays at the same time. They were doing impressive work, not only for people outside, but also from inside, the local audience, who had access to the website and those who went to the exhibitions. They could see their day-to-day lives represented in images they couldn’t find anywhere else. It was very strong.

Viva Favela was there when access to the Internet first arrived in the favelas. The first “lan-houses” in Rio’s favelas were installed in 2001 as part of the same project that made Viva Favela possible. It was a reference, a pioneer initiative that helped pave a way to citizen journalism in Rio and Brazil. Viva Favela won several prizes, was studied by researchers from all continents, it is quoted in more than a dozen thesis and dissertations, media articles, documentary films…

Well, everything changed in the last twenty years… Even Viva Favela, in the last years of activity, between 2010 and 2013, passed by a revolution becoming an open community for the exchange of content in a less editorial and less hierarchical workflow. There was this dynamic of a social network where people from all over Brazil could share content in different languages (video, audio, texts and photos). The revolution started with Orkut, then Facebook, Youtube, Instagram… Some very important movements emerged with the popularization of smartphones and easy access to upload – Passinho, for instance, a dance that was created by young people from Rio’s favelas and became a phenomenon because of Youtube videos that went viral. Now the “correspondents” or “citizen journalists” are Youtubers, Instagrammers and TikTokers, speaking from favelas and peripheries everywhere and becoming unavoidable sources for mainstream media… Of course, the same old traditional newspapers and TV channels keep covering violence as always, but the information on the vibrant life of the favelas is available, and it’s still much more interesting and transformative.