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PÚBLICO newspaper report on Fundão migrant integration strategy wins award
PÚBLICO report wins Corações Capazes de Construir Communication Award with “Fundão has reached out to immigrants and with them is saving the entire region”, Mariana Correia Pinto won the award given by the Corações com Coroa Association in the Journalism category.
The work that earned the journalist the award in the Journalism category – “Fundão has reached out to immigrants and with them is saving the entire region”, with photography by José Sérgio – “was born from the worst we can have in an attempt to show the best”.
Faced with the request from PÚBLICO’s management to cover what was happening in Porto, the journalist from the Local section decided to diverge from the editorial line followed by many media outlets, which explored “history of conflict”. She intended to do a report that “showed not war, but how war is avoided”. It was this purpose that took her to Fundão, to get to know the work of the municipality and its Migration Center up close. “What is happening does not always need to be explained from the geography where it is happening,” she explained in her acceptance speech. “Sometimes we have to look further afield or simply in another direction.”
In addition to humanism, she found a survival strategy for “a region that was withering away and realized that, without help, it would die”: “In the coming years, Portugal will be whatever our capacity to be a welcoming country is like it should be,” the social-democratic mayor of the city, Paulo Fernandes, told her. “It’s the demographics, stupid,” he summed up.
When it was her turn to go up on stage to accept the award, Mariana Correia Pinto, who confessed to being moved when she saw the report projected on the big screen, did not fail to highlight the precarious situation of the Portuguese media, namely the working conditions of journalists, the low wages and the exhaustion of newsrooms. “Exhaustion is the right arm of connivance,” she added. “A journalism without muscle falls, but it does not fall alone – it brings down democracy. Either we save ourselves together, or we fall,” he warned. “History has already told us this story.”
