Pacifista, between Vice and Virtue: Funding Digital Journalism for a “Generation of Peace” in Colombia

Abstract

This is the story of Pacifista. Pacifista is a left-leaning, youth-focused, pro-peace digital-native journalism initiative (meaning it is not the digital version of an established publication) in Colombia. It has been an important outlet that has worked to bridge the breach between urban youth culture and the war-torn countryside in Colombia. Yet, despite its novel editorial approach to timely subject matter, vibrant graphic design and potentially lucrative ability to connect with millennial audiences in Colombia, it struggles to survive financially. This article is about that struggle. As a more freewheeling digital journalism comes to supplant traditional reporting, questions about how digital media’s political economy influences the stories it produces and circulates are vital to understanding transformations in the digital public sphere. In parsing the case of Pacifista, I want to suggest that the same pressures that scholars have identified in allowing corporate interests to subtly condition legacy media’s news production through their advertising budgets are at work in digital-native media. A key difference is that online editorial projects, like Pacifista, often lack the institutional culture and protocols to mediate inevitable conflicts between the editorial and advertising sides of the news business.1 The argument is not intended to be a critique of Pacifista as much as an alarm about the lack of a stable funding model for novel digital journalism projects that cut against the grain of corporate interests. While other scholars have made similar arguments in Western contexts, in less wealthy countries, where subscription models are less viable, such projects are even more vulnerable.2 In the last WhatsApp message that one of my interlocutors at Pacifista sent me, he urged me to publish my article soon “Before Pacifista dies, jajajaja” adding in the next bubble “It’s going broke.” I hope that, by the time you are reading this, the publication will still be posting.