10th piauí Journalism Festival: Editors Amid Chaos
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piauí journalism festival
14 Set 2026
9 min de leitura
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Versão em Português
Translated by Isa Mara Lando
With the theme In the Eye of the Storm – Newsroom Directors in Times of Turmoil, the 10th piauí Journalism Festival, held last weekend at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, hosted eight journalists from seven countries, all of them veterans who have led their newsrooms in incandescent times. These seasoned professionals have led impactful investigations of the highest level, facing authoritarian regimes, threats, defamation, lawsuits, and espionage.
Two Latin American representatives at the festival, Venezuelan Luz Mely Reyes and Salvadoran Carlos Dada live in exile. Invited to the opening panel on Saturday morning, September 5th) Luz Mely is director and co-founder of Efecto Cocuyo, a site created in 2015 that for the last four years has had its access blocked in Venezuela – it can only be reached via VPN. For her independent coverage and refusal to align herself to the ideology of chavismo, Luz Mely has been defamed and threatened with imprisonment. Eventually, in 2023, she decided to go into exile in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her family.
During the conversation with Guilherme Henrique (piauí) and Flávia Marreiro (BBC News Brasil), Luz Mely spoke about the coverage of the extraordinary arrest of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in January this year. She and other Venezuelan journalists broadcast nonstop for almost 11 hours to report the episode. Hoever, only exiled journalists appeared on camera, to protect the identity of those still living in Venezuela. At one point, one of them came across the tweet in which Donald Trump announced Maduro’s capture. “He started reading it live and got so emotional, he couldn’t believe it. So I read out the news in his place. We broke the news first,” Luz Mely recalled. Read more here. Two weeks ago, Luz Mely made a 21-day trip through Venezuela, now governed by President Delcy Rodríguez and under U.S. tutelage.
For Carlos Dada, returning to El Salvador is not possible at all. Dada, founder of the site El Faro, lives in the Netherlands, while his team has settled in Costa Rica. That was the solution they found to escape the authoritarianism of Nayib Bukele, current president of El Salvador.
Dada’s interview opened the festival on Sunday, September 6th, and was led by Consuelo Dieguez (piauí) and Marcelo Lins (GloboNews). The exiled journalist from El Faro stated that he faces “a perfect storm.” For investigating and denouncing Bukele’s government abuses, commercial revenue is almost nil. “No one wants to place ads on our platform and end up fighting with a dictator.” At the same time, expenses with legal defense and other administrative costs have increased. “We are still learning to get around this. The price to pay for doing journalism is increasingly high.”
Even facing all these challenges, El Faro continues to carry out impactful investigations. In 2020, through a series of documents and testimonies from members of the MS-13, also known as Mara Salvatrucha, one of El Salvador’s main gangs, – El Faro was able to expose and prove negotiations and exchanges of benefits between the current government and some gang members. Five years later, further revelations about the closeness between Bukele’s inner circle and the country’s gangs emerged. As a consequence, Dada and other El Faro journalists were hacked by the Israeli software Pegasus, he reported. A summary of the interview can be read here.
Another journalist facing an authoritarian regime is Manisha Pande, who runs the Indian site Newslaundry. On Saturday, September 5th, speaking to reporters Danilo Marques (piauí) and Patrícia Campos Mello (Folha de S.Paulo), Pande explained that young journalists in the country do not know what a press conference is, since the last one given by Modi was twelve years ago. “Asking questions of people in power is a basic task and should not be something extraordinary.”
Pande said that Indian journalism has been hollowed out since Modi came to power in 2014. She says repression does not occur in a “dramatic” way, but through control of narratives, and Newslaundry’s task is precisely to dismantle these narratives. In addition to reporting, she hosts a segment, TV Newsance (a sound pun on news–nuisance), shown on YouTube and focused on criticizing the country’s media. The program mixes news and satire. “Humor has become a tool to bring a light tone to the program and not sound like a sermon,” she explains. “But what is happening in the country is so crazy that I don’t even need to come up with jokes.”
While Luz Mely Reyes, Carlos Dada and Manisha Pande still run their outlets, journalists Alan Rusbridger and Dean Baquet, both interviewed on Saturday, September 5th, have already left their posts. Rusbridger was editor-in-chief of The Guardian between 1995 and 2015. Interviewed by Celso Rocha de Barros (piauí) and Natália Viana (Agência Pública), he recalled major investigations carried out by The Guardian under his leadership, such as Julian Assange’s Wikileaks and Edward Snowden’s leaks. This is how Rusbridger analyzed the differences between the two cases:
“In the Assange case, the British State just kept mum. In the Snowden case, they said, You have to stop. And it’s not up to the state to tell an editor when to stop,” said Rusbridger, who is currently a member of the Oversight Board – an independent supervisory committee for Meta’s social networks, which reviews and recommends which content should be kept or removed from Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Read more about the conversation with Rusbridger here.
Baquet was executive editor of The New York Times between 2014 and 2022, a turbulent period in American history, especially with the rise of Donald Trump. In Baquet’s assessment, the Times, as well as the rest of the American press, was not able to fully realize the level of anger and anti-establishment sentiment that prevailed among part of the electorate. “Many readers thought our coverage was too harsh on Hillary Clinton [the Democratic candidate who ran against Trump in 2016]. I don’t think that was the problem. We didn’t know how to cover the country,” he told André Petry (piauí) and Natuza Nery (GloboNews).
In retrospect, Baquet believes the press underestimated the resentment of the white population after eight years of Obama’s government, as well as their insecurity about the direction of the economy. “The desire for change was widespread, which also helped explain the strengthening of Bernie Sanders,” Baquet said. During the interview, which can be read here, he spoke about the challenges of running the Times during the covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. He also sounded off about Trump’s future.
On Sunday, September 6th, the second day of the festival, after Carlos Dada’s interview the panel welcomed economist Persio Arida for a conversation about the text Rakudianai, published by piauí in April 2011 and considered one of the magazine’s most celebrated pieces in its twenty years of existence. Arida’s touching account about his youth and his involvement with left-wing activism during the Brazilian military dictatorship was analyzed in detail in the interview led by Fernando de Barros e Silva (piauí) and Fernando Gabeira, a political commentator at GloboNews.
Arida stated that he had doubts about the relevance of Rakudianai before writing it. “I didn’t want to write yet another account about torture. Besides, my presence in the armed struggle against the dictatorship was only peripheral,” he said. Later, he convinced himself that the story contained “certain reflections about the country” which were important for the younger generations. Conceiving the account, however, was not easy, Arida admitted during the interview. “For a very long time I never look back. As if the past were a Medusa — if you look back, it will devour you,” he said. In a way, Arida faced his own storm.
Next, Nigerian Musikilu Mojeed and Ukrainian Olga Rudenko talked about the challenges they face in running their respective outlets. Mojeed is editor-in-chief of Premium Times, a site that is a reference in investigative journalism in Nigeria. It was the only outlet in the country to participate in the Panama Papers consortium, which was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize. It publishes reports on irregularities (environmental, social and fiscal) in the Nigerian oil industry, as well as sexual harassment and abuse against women, corporate and state corruption, and massacres committed by security forces.
Mojeed explained to Angélica Santa Cruz (piauí) and Pedro Borges (Alma Preta) that the independent press is treated as an enemy by the Nigerian government and that journalists often have to face threats of violence. One example of this is Mojeed himself, who in March 2020 suffered an attempted invasion of his home. Nigeria’s general elections take place every four years; the next will be held in January 2027. Mojeed says that Premium Times will carry on doing its investigative work, whoever is elected. “Anything you investigate in your small corner, that sheds light on what others want to hide, is investigative journalism,” he said. The interview can be read here.
Olga Rudenko is editor-in-chief of the digital newspaper The Kyiv Independent, which publishes daily news about Ukraine in English. The site was created in 2021 by her and fellow journalists, all of them previously dismissed from the Kyiv Post, until then the country’s most important English-language newspaper. Interviewed by piauí reporters Ana Clara Costa and João Batista Jr., Rudenko said that Ukrainians feel abandoned by the West as they face the Russian invasion. “The Trump administration has left us with a sense of disillusionment. In the end, we are on our own.”
Rudenko explained that the site is sustained mainly by reader subscriptions. “Our relationship with our readership is direct,” said Rudenko. “When someone cancels a subscription, we ask what led them to do that.” For Rudenko, what makes people subscribe to The Kyiv Independent is the dual role that its reporters assume: they inform about the war and explain to foreigners what Ukraine really is, always writing in English.
The festival’s final panel hosted Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been editor-in-chief of The Atlantic since 2016. In his interview with Daniel Bergamasco (piauí) and Flavia Lima (Folha de S.Paulo), Goldberg recalled the behind-the-scenes facts of the investigation that revealed secrets of the Trump administration through messages on Signal. The journalist was included by mistake in a group with White House big names such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Michael Waltz, then National Security Advisor. They were planning imminent military attacks against Houthi rebels in Yemen. “It was the laziest report I ever did. I wouldn’t even need to get out of bed,” he joked.
After publishing the scandal, The Atlantic was harshly attacked by Trump and his followers, claiming that Goldberg should have warned the group about his inclusion by mistake. The journalist said the group was shut down right after the bombings. He also stated that The Atlantic respects his country’s National Security and would never put the life of an American soldier at risk. Finally, he revealed that he was summoned to the White House for a meeting with Trump.
Like the other festival participants, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief reiterated the importance of good journalism, even under challenging conditions. The essential thing in turbulent times, Goldberg reflected, is that the ideas and debates proposed have the widest possible reach.
The 10th piauí Journalism Festival was curated by Daniel Bergamasco, piauí’s digital executive editor, and produced by Raquel Freire Zangrandi. Check out here former editions of the festival.
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