Strengthening Honduran journalists’ ability to report on corruption with open information

Honduras, March 2018 – As part of the European Union Delegation’s policy to strengthen access to information in Honduras, 30 Honduran journalists (11 women and 19 men) from La Tribuna and El Heraldo newspapers in Tegucigalpa received in-house training in data journalism, access to information and data visualisation. The March trainings included building capacity to use the web platforms of the Institute for Access to Public Information (IAIP), while strengthening journalists’ overall ability to research, analyse and visualise information.

This is part of a nine-month training and mentoring activity — led in-field by Media4Democracy Consortium Partner Thomson Foundation — to address the concern of media underuse of IAIP portal and other open data sources.  While the IAIP web portal remains active, the IAIP reported it is not well utilized and most of the journalists that were trained in these workshops had never used these tools.

Editors from La Tribuna and El Heraldo joined the trainings, raising their awareness of the importance of these techniques and the value of assigning reporters’ time to this work.  The two-day data-journalism March courses follow-on trainings in July 2017of 16 Honduran journalists (8 women, 8 men).  These were complemented by a master class in visualisation for journalists working primarily on social media or on-line platforms.

These activities conducted through Media4Democracy technical assistance worked to strengthen the outcomes of EU Delegation efforts to improving access to information in Honduras, including Delegation past support of the work of the IAIP and the establishment of the Institute’s public access and information web Portal Unico de Transparencia and the request platform SIELHO.