Latin America is dotted with news deserts. These are the reporters filling the void

A 2025 study published by Fundacion Gabo mapped out the state of news deserts in five countries in Latin America: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Unsurprisingly, the study showed Latin America is full of news deserts or areas where conditions are weak and extremely critical for practicing journalism in a professional and stable manner. It also found many semi-deserts or places that offer poor conditions for media outlets and their reporters to develop.

Desert and semi-desert news ecosystems surpass 65% of the territory included in the study. This means that many of the people who live in those countries spend their time in an environment where conditions to exercise journalism can be restricted economically, politically or safety-wise. 

Despite these conditions, there are journalists and outlets still operating in these areas and trying to keep their communities informed. I spoke to seven journalists from these areas in Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Honduras and Mexico. We discussed the state of local journalism, the causes of news deserts, and the importance of not leaving these communities behind. 

Where have traditional news publishers gone? 

Many of the outlets I spoke to were created out of necessity. Their founders recognised an information gap in their communities and stepped in to fill it. But this raises a broader question: where have national news publishers gone? This dynamic is not unique to Latin America. Across many regions, traditional national outlets, headquartered in capital cities, have become either unwilling or unable to serve remote and underserved communities.

Manuel Boluarte is the general manager of Inforegión, a digital outlet focused on environmental investigations which operates in the region of Selva Alta in Peru. 

Since Inforegión was founded in 2006, Boluarte has seen traditional media come and go, with large national outlets abandoning regional coverage by removing their investigative units and correspondents as they are considered too expensive to maintain. 

The few news outlets that remain, Boluarte told me, tend to be very permissive with illegal enterprises such as illegal logging, drug trafficking, land trafficking, and illegal mining. “Illegal economies have a lot of money and penetrate institutions, penetrate the armed forces, so how could they not have an impact on the media?” he said. 

For national outlets, even simple tasks like sending a reporter to remote areas or distributing physical newspapers in regions without infrastructure incur high costs that they are unwilling to absorb. 

Judith Calmels is the director of the digital news outlet Plottier Conecta, serving the city of Plottier in Argentinian Patagonia. Calmels told me that funding often dictates whether an outlet is launched in a particular territory, frequently leaving remote areas as "deserts" because they are not seen as profitable markets.

When big news organisations are represented in a territory, most of the journalists I spoke with described that presence as often centralised, superficial, and stigmatising. 

Plottier Conecta in Argentina, for example, was born out of this lack of representation. Even when media outlets from the capital reach smaller towns like Plottier, Calmels said, local voices have no representation in the coverage. News agendas often focus strictly on official government news, leaving the daily lives and needs of the community out of the picture.

“Local voices had no representation in these outlets from the capital, so my idea was to create a news site to give those voices a platform,” she said. “I wanted to tell the everyday stories of people who may be our neighbors, who have a story to tell and have no place in the media.”

“Living almost at God's mercy”

Unfortunately, the same economic pressures hollowing out traditional newsrooms are hitting community-born outlets even harder.

 Many of the organisations emerging for a need to provide reliable information to their communities are expected to do much more with far less: thinner revenue streams, smaller teams, weaker infrastructure, and higher exposure to political and commercial retaliation. 

Alondra Reséndiz is a freelance independent journalist working in the state of Tabasco in Mexico. She described the news ecosystem in the state as “discouraging” when it comes to accessing quality information. That’s why she’s recently launched a newsletter called Ramaje focusing on eight underserved states in the Mexican southeast, including Tabasco. 

“There is some local news, but in many cases it needs to be followed up more closely so that it can be understood by the communities experiencing it,” Reséndiz told me. “This dialogue, and perhaps more active listening to these communities, has been lost to a large extent.”

A young journalist, Reséndiz prefers to stay and work for her region rather than going over to Mexico City. But the biggest challenge for her, and for all the other journalists I spoke to, is funding and financial stability, especially difficult to find when operating in rural regions. 

“Like many colleagues, we have to take on other jobs that are not necessarily journalism,” Reséndiz said. 

Calmels started Plottier Conecta about a year and a half ago with a grant from SembraMedia and Foro de Periodismo Argentino. Her goal was to take the news desert label off Plottier, a Patagonian city with a population of 60,000. As her outlet is still finding its feet, she can’t fully rely on it financially to support herself and her family. 

“The main challenge is making your project sustainable and generating enough income to be able to live off it,” she said.

Financial precarity in all forms is the number one challenge these outlets face. Germán García, the editorial coordinator of the Colombian outlet Entre Ojos, told me that outlets like his live “almost at God’s mercy” when it comes to funding themselves. 

“We trusted that our journalism would be enough to attract people who could fund our work, and we thought of advertising as the only revenue stream, but we were faced with the fact that our journalism was not so attractive to advertisers,” he said. 

García’s outlet serves the regions of Boyacá, Centro Oriente and the Orinoquía in Colombia on topics focused on environment and sustainability. In rural regions, he said, the most attractive revenue stream is government advertising, but they decided to steer clear of it to protect their editorial independence. To survive, they have been mostly relying on grants. 

“We want to do the reporting, do the fieldwork, talk to people, tell the stories of the territory, but the financial challenges are enormous,” he said. 

To take or not to take government money 

Since they are serving underserved communities, newsrooms in news deserts are less likely than others to benefit from commercial advertising or reader revenue models. 

A possible source of income is government advertising, but this is often a threat to editorial independence, which is why many outlets reject it. 

Anabilec Martínez is the content director at Extrategia Medios, a 20-year-old news outlet in the regions of Sabana and Cundinamarca in Colombia. The organisation started as a community radio and a local paper, but now it operates as a digital news outlet. 

Many years ago, Martínez told me, 60 to 70% of her outlet’s funding came from government advertising. Now they’ve reduced that reliance to 15%, noting that local governments withdraw funding or exert pressure if they publish critical reports. 

“We are trying to avoid it but we have been able to do so as we find new sources of income because we have a team to support, but we have never had to sell our content,” says Martínez. “If we publish something that the local administration here doesn’t like, the government press officer calls us to say she doesn’t like it. Then, the pressure begins and in the next period there will be no public contracts.”

While they are located in an underserved region, many companies are based in the area. So they have been able to diversify their revenue with ads from those companies. Martínez told me that now Extrategia Medios mostly relies on the sale of branded content to small, medium and large companies operating in the region. This accounts for over 65% of their revenue. 

However, most regional outlets in Latin America don’t have this option. Edwin Suárez, the director of the Colombian outlet El Morichal, said the retailers in the territory are not interested in advertising. 

El Morichal is a digital newspaper with a monthly printed edition that serves the departments of Guainía and Vichada, and Suárez said that they decided to cut ties with government advertising to avoid any editorial demands. 

“We aim to monitor local government officials,” he said. “So we decided not to accept advertising revenue from state governments and city halls. That reduced our resources significantly, taking away 70% of our income or more. But we feel much more comfortable and at ease.”

Like many newsrooms operating in remote areas, production costs can become very high, very quickly. For example, Suárez told me that in the region where El Morichal operates there is no printing press, so they must pay to print their newspaper in Bogotá and fly it to the territory through a weekly cargo plane, a process that is expensive and logistically complex. Moreover, the cost of a reporting trip to harder-to-reach areas in the territory can cost upwards of $1,000.

“That is one of the barriers, and it is the issue that limits coverage and causes these information deserts,” he says. “The issue of not being able to access information is more about economic resources.”

Depending on grants, subsidies and donations

El Morichal has survived on a financial diet that includes commercial advertising and international grants and subsidies, the latter being a very common survival tool for many outlets in the region. However, access to these international grants is becoming increasingly challenging as many governments and international organisations have begun withdrawing their support to journalism since 2025. 

The Peruvian outlet Inforegión was born in 2006 with the help of the US government to develop a communication project in the area, which back then was riddled with the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso. 

General manager Manuel Boluarte told me they had been working with USAID until January 2025, when support began to dry up. Despite this, Boluarte has been able to move forward by diversifying its revenue through a mix of non-governamental aid, advertisement and communication consulting. 

“I have never relied solely on international cooperation because of the experience I had after the first five years. I said, ‘Cooperation will go away, it will do its job, but if the media wants to continue, it must diversify its income,’” Boluarte said.

Radio La Voz Lenca, a community radio serving the Lenca indigenous community mainly in the highlands of western Honduras, takes a different approach by relying on audience donations. Selvin Milla, one of the team members, told me that they have rejected all large corporate and government ads to remain "coherent" with their human rights mission. 

“[The radio station] is maintained by the people themselves,” said Milla. “For example, when the radio station is in critical condition, we declare a state of emergency and the communities take charge of maintaining the radio station and come together to raise money.”

Taking into account security risks

Operating in remote regions does not only represent a huge logistical and financial challenge but also a security one. These risks can severely limit the ability of journalists to carry out investigative reporting. 

Suárez, from the Colombian outlet El Morichal, describes how there is a sense of insecurity due to the region and the nature of the reporting they do. 

The region of Orinoquía in Colombia is at the intersection of the country’s borders with Venezuela and Brazil, just in the midst of the Amazon, where armed groups roam about. While they have generally been able to maintain the security of their staff, Suárez told me that one of their reporters had to begin laying low as she was directly threatened by armed groups in 2022.

“It’s very complex because you feel the presence of armed groups all the time, and we're reporting on armed groups,” he said. “Being there, I felt very vulnerable because there’s no police, there’s nothing. It’s a rural area where these groups are in control.”

Anabilec Martínez, from Extrategia Medios also in Colombia, said they deal with security concerns due to their reporting on drug trafficking and corruption. She described an instance where they received a video of a domestic violence incident but, because the perpetrator was a well-known and “very dangerous” figure linked to drug trafficking rings, they decided not to publish it themselves and rather pass it along to a big national media outlet. 

For Martínez, being part of the community is not only a blessing, but also a curse since they become more vulnerable to attacks. One of the measures they have decided to take, for example, is to put their offices up in a non-descript building in a location that’s unknown to the public. 

“If we want to talk about a politician who is involved in corruption, we would first have to think about moving to a place where we are not visible, because if that person wants to take some kind of reprisal against us, we don’t want to be martyrs,” she said.

Small victories

Despite all the challenges, all the journalists I spoke to remain resolute in persisting and doing journalism for their communities, as they see it as a vital democratic service that gives a voice to marginalised populations and covers under-reported topics. 

García, from the Colombian environmental outlet Entre Ojos, notes that there is no in-depth journalism associated with socio-environmental issues in this region. Whereas traditional media would cover the area by republishing government press releases, his team goes deeper. 

It has been a challenge to keep on with the mission, García said, but he thinks that someone needs to cover the environmental realities of these regions. “It's a matter of persistence that has brought us small victories,” he said. “We remain convinced that this is the key to meeting the challenge we face.”

Mexican freelance journalist Alondra Reséndiz stresses how centralised the Mexican media landscape is, with most outlets based in Mexico City and the rest of the country under-covered. “Informing citizens clearly, accurately and respectfully makes all the difference when it comes to decision-making,” she said. “The audience is there, and they need these spaces.”

For Selvin Milla, from La Voz Lenca’s, his radio is not only a source of information for the Lenca community but a lifeline. He explains how the outlet serves as a public bulletin board for communities without phone signals, broadcasting personal messages about agriculture, the arrival of family members or sales of tamales, for example. 

Most importantly, however, the radio serves as a tool to amplify the voice of the Lenca people. “The most remote and impoverished communities are those that have always been marginalised, forgotten and rarely heard,” he said. “So having a voice and a say through community media is extremely important because you give a voice to those who have never been heard.”