Journalism, public interest & democracy
Journalism, public interest & democracy. CEO and Co-Founder at Nexo Jornal.
CEO and Co-Founder at Nexo Jornal
As in many countries around the world, misinformation has played an extremely relevant role in shaping the Brazilian political debate. The 2022 presidential elections—the most important electoral race in Brazil’s recent democratic history—were no different. New means of disseminating information, systematic attacks on journalism and distrust of the media by large portions of society are just some of the challenges we face as a part of the Brazilian media ecosystem.
Nexo Jornal’s Instagram account from October 2022 highlights elections-related fake news, featuring its “Free Access” status
This same context, though, has reinforced the essential character of professional, independent journalism as one of democracy’s safeguards.
Nexo is a digital-native newspaper launched in 2015. Since its founding, our main motivation has been to produce journalism that contributes to a high-quality and plural public debate that can strengthen Brazilian democracy. Our editorial principles are balance, clarity and transparency, with a business model intended to ensure our sustainability and independence. We were one of the first Brazilian news organizations to be acknowledged by global journalistic transparency standard the Trust Project and hold the quality of our journalism and the relationship of trust with our audience are at the core of our editorial project.
International audiences will recall that the 2022 Brazilian elections were set against the backdrop of a divided country, where public debate was often based on groundless information. Important players, both public and private, made use of misinformation in a deliberate and strategic way.
Meanwhile, digital platforms had done little to prevent misinformation from ruling just as it did in the preceding election of 2018. Though this limited accountability is not a recent phenomenon, platforms increasingly hold the power to define how information is distributed and accessed by the public, which lends their hands-off approach extra weight.
In the face of this particularly challenging scenario for communication vehicles, we decided to respond with what we do best: our journalism.
Our approach to electoral coverage is described in our manifesto: “opinions do not change facts, but facts change opinions.” By guaranteeing free unrestricted access to our content, we wanted to expand the scope and impact of journalism that seeks excellence, sparks investigations, uncovers facts and promotes balanced interpretations of events.
Ten days before the first round of voting, Nexo dropped the paywall for all election-related content. This meant anyone—not just paid subscribers—now had access to special content, visual news and critical articles covering electoral processes and campaigns for president, governors, senators and representatives.
As an advertising-free newspaper, with nearly half of Nexo’s revenue from subscriptions, this is not a decision we took lightly. We prioritize this business model, which is hardly common in the industry, to ensure the sustainability and independence of the newspaper. While removing the paywall answers our mission, it also means giving up potential subscribers and revenue. The tipping point for the paywall decision—and the extra-monetary value it would provide—lay first and foremost in recognizing our need to experiment: to test out new partnerships and new monetization models; to invent creative ways to remind society of the importance of journalism; and to meaningfully deepen our relationship with our subscribers.
Our manifesto for electoral coverage featured the following claim: “opinions don’t change facts, but facts change opinions.” By guaranteeing free access to our content, we aimed to broaden the reach and impact of journalism that checks and exposes facts with transparency and provides balanced interpretations of events. “The decision was prompted by Nexo’s commitment to democracy at a time when professional journalism is crucial to redeeming the quality of public debate,” we explained at the time. And it was possible thanks to the support of Luminate and IRIS—the International Resource for Impact and Storytelling.
Infographic featured on Nexo Jornal’s free coverage of the Google daily advertising expenditures by leading candidates Bolsonaro and Lula during the two rounds of voting during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election
This was not the first time we removed our paywall. During the 2018 election, we offered all election-related content also for a specific period of time. In 2020, in the face of the severity of the health crisis and the role of misinformation, we freed up access to all pandemic-related materials we produced. This content remains free to this day.
Brazil has an extremely traditional and centralized media ecosystem, which has an impact on how the national public debate is shaped.
Events like the pandemic and the elections are good reminders of the true vocation and the raison d’être of the media: to serve society. In other words, they shine a spotlight on journalism, newscasting and the production of information as activities that require public interest as their guiding principle.
When we first lowered our paywall, there was concern about how our paying subscribers would react. After all, these materials accounted for more than 75% of Nexo’s daily production and we were giving away for free something they were being charged for. The reactions, however, were overwhelmingly positive, with subscribers not only supporting but also commending our decision.
This kind of mobilization, from subscribers and funders, signals a consensus on the importance of accountable journalism’s presence in crucial moments for democracy and for the history of our nation. This was certainly the case for the 2022 elections.
Financial fragility has been an issue for large, small, young and traditional media outlets around the world. We are all searching for a formula to fund our journalism. We have too many questions, and in many cases, construct the answers anew each day.
If we intend to find answers to the crisis of sustainability in journalism, they will lie in valuing the quality of what we produce, in our commitment to ethics and transparency, and, most certainly, in experimentation.
And in this particular aspect, philanthropy’s interest and investment in journalism can make a major difference.
High-quality, reliable information is essential for well-informed and discerning citizens and, therefore, to ensure the quality of democracies. A strong media ecosystem that is plural, ethical and immune to vested interests must be part of any social development agenda. The growing willingness of the philanthropic world to support media projects brings optimism to this field.
This kind of funding allows vehicles to take risks, something that is essential to innovation, but hard to embrace in a time of crises. If properly done, it can also stimulate learning experiences that can be shared across the ecosystem. It can create opportunities to address themes that don’t necessarily have adequate space in the industry—such as gender and race equality—and are key to delivering better and more accountable journalism.
These are some examples among many others. The important point is that, when we talk about philanthropic support for the media, we are talking about strengthening the civic space.
Sustainability is no trivial matter. This is an industry that took a long time to understand the pivotal nature of the digital world and renew itself accordingly. There are countless challenges, chief among them relevant ethical questions raised by business models that, unfortunately, are still considered acceptable. At Nexo, we regard sustainability as something essential to the business model because it assures our political, religious, and business financial independence, to name a few of the interests that have infiltrated a significant part of the media in the country and in the world.
We have a policy of absolute transparency concerning the support we receive. We leave money on the table when we come across proposals not fully aligned with our ethical principles. We do not use clickbait-style advertising features such as Taboola or Outbrain, which are common on many other sites, as they deliberately confuse the reader, or worse, by mixing editorial content with misleading ads.
These choices impose limits on our revenue potential, but we are rewarded with a unique relationship of trust with our readers. The value of this trust is essential to the long-term sustainability of any media organization and, more broadly, to the health of any democracy.