Gabo Award winners claim ‘slow journalism’

The 2022 Gabo Award Winners claimed this Friday, during the delivery ceremony that opened the Gabo Festival in Bogotá, slow journalism, journalism with time, which has allowed the best stories to be made in Spanish and Portuguese this year that have dealt with the war in Ukraine, migration or silenced tragedies.

Recount a quick event, such as the sinking of a boat carrying migrant “stowaways” from Africa to Argentina or the burning of a home in Guatemala. Or delve into events as traumatic as the occupation of a town on the outskirts of kyiv.

With detail, stories made by many hands, revisiting topics that seem exhausted, is what the Gabo Foundation has awarded this year.

“I want to highlight slow journalism, which respects the time that traditional journalism needs”, which allows “diving into the details, into the hows and whys”, said the Argentine Ricardo Robins, winner in the Text category for “El stowaway and the captain”, that tells of the shipwreck of a boat with migrants and was published in Rosario3.

For Alejandra Gutiérrez, winner of the Coverage category for “It wasn’t the fire” published in the Guatemalan Ocote Agency, “journalism is always in a head-on fight against time because the mandate, what is expected of us, is that we arrive first, that we jump from one topic to another, from one impunity to other”.

In this multimedia report, Gutiérrez and the rest of the Ocote Agency team, talk about the Hogar Seguro fire that in 2017 claimed the lives of 41 girls and adolescents. A story that, due to its status as an event, had “forgetfulness as its best ally”, but which they wanted to rescue to “open windows and routes so that a country and the world know” what really happened.

Three of the five awards have gone to Argentine media or journalists, since in addition to Robins, she was awarded in the new Audio category “The Second Death of the Punk God”, published in Erre Podcast by Nicolás Maggi and his team, and photographer Rodrigo Abd won the Photography award for “The Silent Pain of Ukraine” that he made for the Associated Press (AP).

Precisely, the other protagonist of this tenth edition of the awards has been the war in Ukraine, since in addition to Abd’s photographic work, the Multimedia category was won “X-ray of a town under Russian occupation for 30 days”, published in El Observador de Portugal.

Both the El Observador team and Abd wanted to vindicate those who have been under atrocities and the yoke of war for months, and the Argentine photographer hoped that both his photos and the work of his colleagues who are documenting the Russian invasion “serve as evidence of massacres to that at some point someone will be judged for what is happening there.

40 years of a Nobel

The ceremony was the opening finale of the Gabo Festival, which was moved for the first time to the Colombian capital, where it is expected to continue, and that begins precisely on the day that commemorates the 40 years in which Colombia woke up to news that has marked the recent history of a country where bad news has unfortunately accumulated.

On October 21, 1982, Gabriel García Márquez received a call: he had been the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was the first Colombian to receive it and they recognized his chronicles, his stories about that magical realism that in Colombia is better known as simple realism.

Aracataca, his hometown, became a party. They cooked sancocho (a soup with vegetables, tubers and meat or fish) to celebrate an award for all even though it had been awarded to García Márquez, who despite being recognized as one of the greatest writers in Spanish, claimed to be a journalist.

“I don’t want to be remembered for ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ or for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspaper. I was born a journalist and today I feel more like a reporter than ever,” the coastal author assured in an interview shortly after being recognized. with the Nobel.

For this reason, this year the Gabo Festival, the biggest festival of Ibero-American journalism, pays tribute to that happy anniversary but also, once again, to the best journalism done in Spanish and Portuguese.

EFE