Colombian journalist and producer Miguel García has built his career spotlighting resilience and culture in communities often overlooked.
From childhood days immersed in magazines and cassette stories to producing television that amplifies ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, he’s long believed in journalism’s power to connect the local and the global.
Now, at Report for the World, García is channeling that passion into strengthening grassroots media across Latin America.
Can you tell us a bit about your background—where you’re from and what brought you into journalism in the first place?
I am Colombian, a country as wonderful as it is extreme, as free, festive, and vibrant as it is gloomy, violent, and conservative.
As a child, while learning to read, I would sneak into my father’s library to listen to cassette tapes of traditional novels and leaf through the Life, National Geographic, Cromos, and Geo magazines in his collection.
That set of images, stories, and accounts of distant places, people, and cultures in the magazines contributed to my becoming a journalist; so I came to journalism because of my interest in the visual narrative that found its space in the print magazine in the format of the photo essay that Henri Cartier-Bresson spoke about. This is where it all started.
What inspired you to join Report for the World, and what does our mission mean to you personally?
The media environment needs to grow; it must be diverse in its perspectives, approaches, and agenda-setting that respond to the needs of citizens and communities. The legacy media increasingly respond to large corporate interests and have lost their connection with the people. While emerging media and what were once called alternative media, with their approaches and interests, engage citizens, are closer to them, and strengthen democracy.
There are projects that, through their grants, promote a perspective that responds to monitoring the interests of the North in the global South, to follow up on European or US interests in our countries, and from the newsrooms we run the risk of following that agenda in order to access resources. But RFW is one of those projects that seeks, on the one hand, to strengthen and consolidate emerging media, and on the other, to support them so that they can continue working and investigating issues that are important to their local agendas with global perspectives. A clear example of that is the coverage of the negotiations and signing of the free trade agreement between the UK and India on generic medicines, signed last July, which has a direct impact on health in Africa. And each party has different interests in its approach. A program like RFW helps support newsrooms in maintaining their independent news agenda with a local perspective and global impact.
What specific skills or networks are you bringing to RFW, and how do you intend to leverage them to support under-covered reporting?
Part of my career has been as a television producer. Production has a creative dimension in terms of finding and telling stories, but it also has a pragmatic dimension that involves mobilizing personnel, materials, and equipment to make a story possible. Those skills and experience, along with my ability to establish connections and collaboration between work teams, is what I bring to the table at RFW.
Which of RFW’s core values—like community engagement, sustainability, or local storytelling—resonates most with you, and why?
I am a journalist; reporting and storytelling are my element and I am passionate about it, so I am always keen to produce content. At the same time, sustainability of journalistic projects is crucial for the media environment, to prevent information monopolies, as well as to generate employment, pay taxes, and ensure good practices and conditions for media workers. Creating a business and a journalistic enterprise is no small challenge. You have to play by the rules of the game and the market. It is important to formalize processes. Cultural enterprises, media outlets, whether alternative, independent, large or small, activist or not, need… we need that: formalization. This effort involves dedication, organization, persistence, taxes, salaries, management indicators, reports—in short, a formal and organized endeavor on the one hand, and on the other, an editorial proposal with relevant, quality content to exercise the right to inform and be informed and to guarantee freedom of the press in an environment that, it must be said, is increasingly hostile to the media and journalists. Collaborating with journalists and media outlets to strengthen their capacities, consolidate them, and make them sustainable projects is a very beautiful commitment and an important value at RFW.
How do you envision your role evolving here, both in terms of your own growth and in advancing the program’s impact?
I believe in the projects I participate in and commit to them. I also like to take one step at a time. The project is in a transition of growth; it takes a collective effort to achieve its success. The RFW program in Latin America has great potential for growth. The media outlets and journalists who have participated in it have done a great job in promoting the most important value we have as journalists: credibility. That is an effort we must maintain, but we must also bring in new approaches, perspectives, and players to enrich it. If the project grows, we all grow.
What excites you most about working in journalism today, especially within the context of underserved communities or global challenges?
We live in an interconnected world that is undergoing profound crises, perhaps, as some analysts have said, at a time of change toward something that is not yet very clear what it will be. We are fortunate to be witnesses of our time. That excites me about journalism. And the challenges we face are not small. Whatever we do or fail to do today has an impact on the rights of future generations. That is my motivation.
Can you share a powerful or memorable moment from your journalism career so far—something that reminds you why you do this work?
I started working on a television news program, and it was an environment in which I had to unlearn many things I thought I knew about journalism, and at the time it was not very clear to me what I was doing there. Later, I went on to work as a producer for a magazine program produced by the Ministry of Culture for Colombian public television. And what I learned from that experience was to see people and communities who, despite being in the most adverse circumstances, in the midst of the violence of conflict, poverty, or uprooting, remained proud, defying adversity through culture and art. That never ceases to amaze me. That’s where I found my place. I knew that my work had meaning in making visible the extraordinary stories of ordinary, perhaps anonymous people, stories of resilience, overcoming adversity, and hope.
Looking ahead, what kinds of stories or issues—such as climate, corruption, education, or human rights—are you most eager to help bring to light through RFW?
The defense of human rights, talking about the social determinants of health, caring for our common home, and also defending the rights of future generations are issues in which I have a particular interest, and Latin America is at the center of these global discussions. This gives regional and local journalism an exceptional opportunity to make its contribution at a historic moment in time.
How do you think our regional partners (like AIJC, Factum, ARIJ, etc.) can amplify RFW’s mission, and what role will you play in that collaboration?
Using a football reference that is so familiar to us in Latin America, Brazilian idol Pelé, speaking about teamwork, said: “No individual can win a game by himself.” The same is true in the media: teamwork and collaboration are crucial to the success of a news organization. Journalists, even freelancers, are not islands; they need backing and support to do their work.
Another quote says, “”Football is a game of details, and we control the details.” The same is true in journalism. In news rooms before a deadline we know that “the devil is in the details”. Paying attention to details is where the strength of the project lies, but also in its diversity, skills, and versatility of those who make up each cohort, but also in their collaboration and the networks that can be built. My job is to facilitate those connections and collaborations.
What message would you like to share with our community and supporters about why grassroots journalism through Report for the World matters—and how they can stay engaged?
Every day we are learning lessons: from news journalism, investigative journalism, to content creation, from collaborations, from community journalism to solutions journalism. Life is movement, journalism is movement. The development of technology is closely related to the advancement of the media and has made it more democratic, but it has also brought its own challenges.
The late Colombian journalist Javier Darío Restrepo said at a conference in 2015: “Journalism has not changed, journalism remains the same: consulting sources, corroborating information, obtaining evidence. It has always been this way, then and now. What has changed is the format and the way in which information is presented.” And I would add its focus and purpose for the greater good.
Community media, alternative media, solution-focused media, and even activist-led media are reshaping the media landscape and the way we consume media.
In our time, the truth—or at least something close to it—has become a commodity, a luxury, which requires us as communicators and journalists to be assertive, clear, direct, and transparent when presenting our work, building and strengthening communities, and engaging with our audiences while responding to the interests of our organizations and all stakeholders in common goals.
As citizens and consumers, these times challenge us to be demanding about the information we consume, to filter information, to weigh it up, and to question and demand accountability. It is an exercise in shared responsibility. That is where we meet.