Ten independent news sites joined forces to form Aliados, a network of investigative media platforms across Latin America.
Newsrooms from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru will work together to find answers for issues of funding and sustainability in investigative digital journalism.
Aliados members include digital news sites, magazines of political satire and commentary, nonprofit advocacy groups and others of "professional quality, transparency, independence from political and economic influences and factual accuracy on the realities of Latin America and the world in a way that traditional media platforms in the region are not doing it," according to the organization's mission statement (in Spanish).
"The sites are very different from each other, but are united in a common objective: to produce good journalism and contribute to democracy and transparency in their countries," wrote Rosental Alves, director and founder of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas in this post.
From launch, many of the startups have spoken out against corruption and advocated for transparency amid political revolution. Chilean political satire and humor magazine The Clinic began as a printed pamphlet satirizing former dictator Augusto Pinochet. El Salvador's political journalism site El Faro emerged just as the country ended its civil war. Website Agência Pública in Brazil exposes human rights violations committed during the country's military dictatorship.
You can read more about the other members here.
Via The Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via Chris Blakeley.