Audio: An in-depth look at Mongabay’s collaboration with The Intercept Brasil

by Mike Gaworecki on 7 February 2017 |

Branford is a regular contributor to Mongabay who has been reporting from Brazil since 1979 when she was with the Financial Times and then the BBC.
One of the articles in the series resulted in an official investigation by the Brazilian government before it was even published — and the investigators have already recommended possible reparations for an indigenous Amazonian tribe.
We also round up the top news of the past two weeks.

On the latest episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we welcome journalist Sue Branford, a regular contributor to Mongabay who has been reporting from Brazil since 1979 when she was with the Financial Times and then the BBC.

Branford is one of the writers behind a hard-hitting 14-part series in English and Portuguese that Mongabay is producing with The Intercept-Brasil exploring the many impacts of massive dam development projects in Brazil’s Tapajos Basin.

You can read all the features and watch the powerful videos Sue and team have produced for the series right here.

Sometimes your reporting has an impact that you don’t actually realize…These reports that we’re doing for Mongabay, we may discover such an impact…the Brazilian prosecutor is asking for compensation for this indigenous community, but there may also be other impacts that we only discover years later.

We journalists sometimes feel we just go on reporting and don’t really change very much, but now and again you come up with cases where you very definitely have changed things, and it makes you feel like, OK, it really was worthwhile.

– Sue Branford

And here’s this episode’s top news:

For those of you who want to keep up with the top news as it’s happening, we rolled out topic-based news alerts that allow you to get daily or weekly notifications via email about topics that you select. We started with a set of about 20 topics and plan to expand the list. Go here to sign up.

And don’t forget, you can find all of our podcast episodes on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, Google Play, and RSS.

An indigenous woman washing a carpet in Brazil’s Teles Pires River. The Munduruku and other indigenous groups rely on the river for everything — for work and play, as livelihood and a transportation corridor. The Teles Pires dam has negatively impacted many of these activities. Photo by Thais Borges.

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