It is widely known that Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to be a reporter and one of the deadliest at that. However, in 2018, when I applied for a Magic Grant at The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, there was a big gap in the understanding of this long crisis: little of us knew the reporters beyond the fact that they had been victims of homicide. To me, that was doubly tragic. A person’s entire legacy had been reduced to what someone else did to them and us, as a people, where missing out on all that they had reported and published. As I began my research, I quickly realized that most of the slain journalists’ work was quickly disappearing —not because some nefarious criminal was censoring their work, but because of how precarious their publications were. Most killed journalists in Mexico worked for their own media outlets, most of them printed in small weeklies without proper archiving or on social media and blogs. With this in mind, I set out to build a living archive that could cull together all these works to a) preserve them as a source of information about Mexico in the XXI century, b) to help change the narrative about killed journalists from mere victims of homicide to complex people who contributed to our democracy by keeping us informed and c) as a tool for research, investigations, accountability and academia. In 2019, the living archive was launched.

Here you can read a review of the archive in the American Journalism journal.

“Democracy Fighters” Opens in Mexico City: On the evening of October 9, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Article 19 gathered at Casa Refugio Citlaltépetl in Mexico City for the launch of Democracy Fighters, a digital archive that aggregates and preserves the works of journalists killed in Mexico. Since 2000, 111 journalists and media workers have been killed in the country, turning it into one of the deadliest to be a reporter in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Democracy Fighters currently hosts over 12,000 clips from 40 journalists spanning over 30 years. It was the recipient of a 2018-19 Magic Grant.

A 2018-2019 Magic Grant Profile: “Ibarra Chaoul believes that the only way to truly honor these reporters’ legacy and understand these deaths is by placing the work of the killed journalists into context. In so doing she attempts to “flip the narrative away from their final moments to their work”. To this end, she has partnered with a reporter and a historian, as well as a programmer responsible for web scraping and digitization, and together they have collected over 8,000 clips from 25 journalists and 41 publications, so far.”

Our 2018-2019 Winter “All Hands” Meeting: “The projects are often creatively ambitious, telling stories in entirely new ways. One such project is starting with a meticulously assembled database — a hard reporting exercise that is trying to balance the cold logic of a spreadsheet and the nuances of lived experience. The team led by Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul, a recent graduate from the Journalism School, is recovering and archiving the work of the 100 or so journalists killed in Mexico since 2000. These are painful stories, but these journalists’ efforts are quickly disappearing as news outlets disappear. Chaoul’s work is a mix of methods, from oral history to detailed internet investigations.”

Democracy Fighters - a Magic Grant project.

Backstory about the grant: https://twitter.com/luoach/status/1107743857674997760