WE WON!
InquireFirst wins two international environmental journalism awards in 2024
InquireFirst is the proud recipient of two international journalism awards in 2024 for our coverage of climate change and the environment.
In July 2024, Covering Climate Now recognized our multimedia project SOS: Climate Change Threatens Our Traditional Foods as a winner in the Food & Agriculture category.
Covering Climate Now received 1,250 entries for this year’s awards from journalists in dozens of countries. We are honored and thrilled that our Historias Sin Fronteras project written by a team of environmental journalists in Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia and Panama is among the winners.
Our congratulations to the talented and committed and journalists who spent several months researching and writing the stories! They are:
Johanna Osorio, Venezuela
María Clara Valencia, Colombia
Ruth Vargas, Bolivia
Sonia Tejada, Panama
InquireFirst awarded a reporting grant to these journalists during our day-long Historias Sin Fronteras (HSF) workshop at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Medellín in March 2023. After making a compelling pitch in a session attended by almost 50 Latin American science writers, their project was selected to receive a grant by HSF co-founders Iván Carrillo, who edited the project, and Lynne Walker, executive director of InquireFirst.
The 2024 panel of Covering Climate Now Award judges said:
“Arepas, pabéllon, bandeja paisa, and even rice itself: Many of Latin America’s staple foods, dishes that have defined culture for generations, are at risk due to extreme weather and declining crop yields. For Historias Sin Fronteras, journalists from across the region tell three interconnected stories that ask readers to contemplate climate change from the vantage points of their kitchen tables.
“Serving up intimate human stories with ample helpings of data and mouth-watering food photography, the stories impressively encapsulate many of the complex ties between climate change and agriculture and food. If more food writing dovetailed with climate reporting like this, we would all be better informed eaters.”
In April 2024, our multimedia project titled Traces of Oil in the Peruvian Amazon won Third Place in the Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category of Excellence in Environmental Journalism.
This project, meticulously reported and beautifully written by journalists Barbara Fraser, Marilez Tellez and Leonardo Tellez in Peru and photographed by Ginebra Peña, put an international spotlight on the devastating impact of 50 years of oil exploration in the Peruvian Amazon. The project was edited by Bolivian environmental journalist Eduardo Franco Berton, founder of RAIBolivia.org.
Barbara Fraser, a freelance journalist who has lived in Peru for more than 30 years, and Marilez Tello, an indigenous journalist working at Radio Ucamara on the banks of Peru’s Marañón River, traveled to Istanbul for the April 2024 award ceremony.
Some 400 entries from 96 countries were submitted for this year’s Fetisov Journalism Awards — and more than 100 of those entries were in the Excellence in Environmental Journalism Category.
Fraser said, “It was interesting to see how many of the (Fetisov) winners are freelancers. It made me realize how important projects like InquireFirst are. Without grants, it’s next to impossible to do the kind of reporting that wins this kind of award.”
Most of the $10,000 in prize money will be used by Radio Ucamara to expand its reach to more indigenous communities in Peru’s Amazon.
We are also excited to report that a team of four early-career journalists in Quito, Ecuador, whose compassionate and data-driven project In the bubble: how to survive Down Syndrome in Ecuador was awarded Honorable Mention for Reporting in Digital Media by the National Journalists’ Union of Ecuador in February 2024.
Gabriela Coba, an Ecuadorian journalist with Primicias, Kevin Hidalgo with Revista Vistazo, Emilia Paz y Miño with GK Ecuador and Manuel Novik with Plan V, produced their in-depth project in just six weeks during our Voces Emergentes Ecuador program in the summer of 2023.
Working as a team and guided by editor Gabriel Pasquini, a columnist with The Washington Post, the four journalists researched, wrote and published their multimedia project in August 2023.
In more good news, HSF editor Iván Carrillo was recognized by Covering Climate Now in a separate category for a short documentary that he and an international team of journalists produced, “Glaciers: A World Without Ice?”
The judges called his work “a model documentary” and said, “At a time when many people’s understanding of climate change is still limited, we need more well-crafted explanatory journalism like this.”
More Awards
EL PASO, Texas – Twelve journalists from Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador spent a week conducting intensive reporting on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border during a program organized in March 2024 by InquireFirst.
The program took journalists to two border cities – first to San Diego, California, and then to El Paso, Texas – to report on the complex and multifaceted immigration situation as the United States reported a record 2.5 million encounters with migrants in fiscal year 2023.
Journalists interviewed migrants who had been released on the streets in San Diego with orders to appear in immigration court, volunteers working with migrant aid organizations, Border Patrol agents and officials, migrants who had been detained after crossing the desert, and organizations whose immigration lawyers are assisting migrants with their asylum claims.
They journalists witnessed firsthand the stark contrasts marking the 2,000-mile border – the Pacific Ocean where migrants sometimes attempt to swim, jet ski or surf to the United States at the western end of the border and the harsh, unforgiving desert at the eastern end.
They interviewed Border Patrol Air and Marine Operations, which detains and rescues migrants arriving by boat and others walking through the Mexico-Texas desert. They also talked with Texas business owners who worry that the migration of people from around the world, people who sometimes pass through their property, will cost them their livelihoods.
This video by IR Producciones highlights the week that the journalists spent reporting on immigration. InquireFirst will be working with groups of Latin American immigration journalists throughout the year.
Golden Globe Foundation supports En Común
for fifth season
We’re pleased to announce that InquireFirst has received funding from the Golden Globe Foundation for a fifth season of En Común: conocimiento en voz viva, our radio program on science, health and environment tailored for rural and Indigenous communities in Mexico.
The Golden Globe Foundation is providing funding that will make it possible for En Común to broadcast 20 weekly, science-based reports in 2025 on health and environmental issues that affect Indigenous communities that form a multicultural mosaic of diverse ethnic identities, ancestral knowledge and cultural values in Mexico.
Our unique program — we are not aware of any other Spanish-language radio program directed by experienced international journalists that is focused on science, health and the environment – reaches hundreds of thousands of people in underserved rural and Indigenous communities with carefully reported, fact-based science, health and environmental programs.
The radio program shares the voices of Indigenous people in Mexico as our reporters – many of them Indigenous journalists working for the first time with an international media organization – record the concerns and the experiences of people in their communities.
En Común co-founder and executive producer Iván Carrillo and InquireFirst Executive Director Lynne Walker have formed alliances with regional and national radio networks in Mexico that allow us to reach community radio stations stretching from Chiapas at Mexico’s southern border to Baja California at the U.S.-Mexico border.
With the impact of climate change, the threat to the country’s biodiversity and the critical shortage of water facing large swaths of the country, the need is growing for Mexican journalists who understand science and who know how to make scientific information understandable for their audiences.
“I think it is very important that En Común exists, that it links experts on the current and most important issues with radio stations that are bringing information to Indigenous people,” said Maria Quechulpa Perez, a bilingual (Nahuatl-Spanish) reporter and anchor at Radio XEZON in Veracruz who reports for En Común. “It allows reporters to develop intellectual topics that are of great help for us as Indigenous communicators.”
En Común gives voice to Indigenous communities that are often overlooked by mainstream media.
“We are constantly searching for spaces where we are heard as Indigenous Mayan women,” said Yolanda May Che, a bilingual (Mayan-Spanish) reporter and anchor for Radio XNHKA in Quintana Roo who has reported for En Común since its inception. “It is a struggle to make our voices reach all possible media. En Común opens that gap and I am able to advance and highlight my work as an indigenous Mayan communicator.”
InquireFirst was honored to be among the Golden Globe Foundation’s invited guests at a Grantees’ Dinner at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on January 5, 2024, as part of Golden Globes weekend.
Thanks to our Sponsor
Historias Sin Fronteras
co-founder and editor Iván Carrillo awarded first-ever Earth Journalism Network fellowship
Our congratulations to Iván Carrillo, co-founder and editor of Historias Sin Fronteras, who received a 2024 Year-Long Reporting Fellowship – the first ever awarded by the Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
Iván is one of only four journalists in the world to receive this prestigious fellowship. The three other journalists who have been awarded the Fellowship are from Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil.
Since 2019, when InquireFirst launched Historias Sin Fronteras at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Lausanne, Switzerland, Iván has guided 14 cross-border science, health and environment projects from idea to reporting to writing to publication.
He has worked with 40 journalists from countries throughout Latin America whose Historias Sin Fronteras projects have been published by 52 media organizations.
Ivan has focused much of his own reporting on climate change and the impact on biodiversity. His work has appeared in National Geographic and the Latin American editions of Newsweek. And he has collaborated with Discovery Channel, CNN in Español, El WESO, Radio Mexiquense, Grupo Expansión and many other media organizations.
We are also thrilled that Iván is the co-founder and executive producer of our science, health and environment radio program, En Común: conocimiento en voz viva.
Iván traveled to London in February 2024 to attend an EJN orientation and training workshop that focuses on subjects such as covering global biodiversity policy, guidelines for reporting on Indigenous conservation practices, strategies to unpack climate science for audiences, the crucial role of ocean diplomacy, and much more.
Iván will be focusing his reporting during the Fellowship on biodiversity.
EJN Biodiversity Trainer Mike Shanahan, who will be working with Iván on story production and professional development, said, “There is no shortage of stories to tell about the many environmental challenges facing humanity, but it is rare for journalists to have the freedom to report in depth on these issues. EJN’s year-long fellowships will enable four highly committed journalists to immerse themselves in their chosen topics while developing their knowledge and skills through tailored support and training.”
2023 symposiums
Science Journalism Workshop
Exploring Baja California’s rich biodiversity and protecting its species for future generations
Baja California, México
June-November 2023
During our four-week environmental science journalism workshop, 25 reporters working at media organizations across the Baja California Peninsula will meet with U.S. and Latin American environmental writers and editors to discuss the urgent environmental stories that require coverage in the Baja California-California region.
Our speakers will discuss ways to address environmental challenges faced by residents in the region as well as topics ranging from the dwindling flow of the Colorado River to the rebirth of the California condor population to environmental justice.
They will also discuss methods to make science writing compelling to mass audiences, how to engage audiences in citizen science, and equally important, staying safe while conducting environmental investigations.
The second part of the workshop will focus on hands-on reporting, with Baja California journalists teaming with U.S. scientists and researchers working on the Baja Peninsula for field visits and in-depth environmental reporting.
Voces Emergentes Ecuador
Investigative Journalism
for the Next Generation of Reporters
July 17-August 25, 2023
The 24 early-career journalists selected for this program will work in teams to produce timely and relevant multimedia projects that will focus on some of the most urgent problems confronting the people of Ecuador.
The journalists will be guided by our international team of editors as they report and write an in-depth investigative project and produce multimedia elements such as photo slideshows, interactive graphics, audio and videos. They will work with their editors to ensure that they handle their subjects with sensitivity, with accurate and careful reporting, and above all, with the highest standards of journalistic ethics and professionalism.
At the conclusion of the six-week program, the projects will be published on our website, vocesemergentes.com/ecuador
SYMPOSIUMS
World Conference of Science Journalism
2023
MEDELLIN, Colombia — When we organize a workshop at InquireFirst, we put journalists to work!
That’s exactly what happened during our day-long March 27 workshop at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Medellin. Almost 40 journalists from 14 countries joined us for our Historias Sin Fronteras workshop, which focused on strengthening science, health and environmental journalism through cross-border reporting.
MERIDA, Mexico – “There’s no more important work than the work being done by journalists,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature, during a February 2020 environmental investigative journalism workshop organized by InquireFirst.
As the world witnesses a “massive acceleration in extinction” of species, coverage of
MEDELLIN, Colombia – InquireFirst Executive Director Lynne Walker met with journalists in Medellín and Cali, Colombia, July 29-August 3 to discuss new techniques for conducting investigative reporting.
During the programs organized by the Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Walker led interactive sessions with journalists who cover
LAUSANNE, Switzerland – We’re pleased to announce that InquireFirst has awarded our first reporting grants to a team of Latin American science writers to support their work on a cross-border regional health story.
The reporters on the team were selected during our Jack F. Ealy Science Journalism Workshop, which was
MEXICO CITY – “Writing is music…language can be used in so many creative ways,” Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, told almost 30 science and health journalists attending our regional workshop in Mexico City.
As Blum lead journalists through an interactive workshop on narrative science
FULLERTON, Calif. – Top U.S. journalists joined InquireFirst as speakers at our “Transparency and Investigative Reporting” workshop Feb. 25-March 1, when Latin American journalists traveled to Southern California to attend sessions on fact-checking, in-depth investigative reporting, cyber security and reporting with drones.
Among our speakers were:
Ginger Thompson, senior reporter
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador -- S. Lynne Walker, President and Executive Director of InquireFirst, traveled to Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador, in January 2019 to instruct a series of interactive workshops titled “Investigative Journalism in High-Risk Situations.”
In Guayaquil, journalists from newspapers, television networks and online news sites participated in a nine-hour interactive
PALO ALTO, Calif. – Latin American science journalists were presented with a host of new professional development opportunities during the Jack F. Ealy Science Journalism Workshop at Stanford University.
The June 17-21, 2018 workshop, organized by InquireFirst and Mexico City-based Fundación Ealy Ortiz, focused on training opportunities – with Latin
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica – Science and health journalism should not be limited by international borders. Complex new health threats such as Zika virus that occur in a “noisy” media environment require a new model of reporting, Andrew Revkin, strategic adviser on science and environmental journalism for The National Geographic
MEXICO CITY – Prominent Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui said the internet presents “a great light and a great shadow ” for journalism in an era of fake news
On the opening day of a journalism TechCamp in Mexico City, Aristegui acknowledged “there is serious questioning” of the
