Juanita Leon

Juanita León is promoting a new model for journalism in Colombia and in the Andean region. Juanita’s goal is to position La Silla Vacia as the most consulted news source as a tool for the country’s development while also serving as an example of innovative journalism throughout Colombia and beyond.

La Silla Vacia is an online news platform combining professionally reported political analysis, high-level discourse, expert blogging, and citizen journalism. Informed by diverse perspectives and designed to involve a new generation in political debate, it has rapidly emerged as a credible and authoritative alternative to Colombia’s entrenched traditional media.Juanita sees the Internet as an opportunity to establish a new journalism model. La Silla Vacia is not interested in reporting the news of the moment as most conventional media do. It is focused on telling the story behind the news. By connecting the facts and doing in-depth interpretation and analysis of news with an appealing narrative using new technologies, Juanita is engaging citizens with the most urgent and relevant matters. Accompanying the work of professional journalists, La Silla Vacia website also features opinion articles from decision-makers, professional experts from the most important research institutes and universities, young leaders, and the community. Its sources are diverse and highly reliable: Actors from the left, the right, and the center participate.Juanita is working to provide well-balanced information and poignant analysis that contributes to forming critical thinking among Colombians and especially among the youngest generations. She is promoting civic participation by inviting people to collaborate in co-writing articles or covering news after giving them coaching. Juanita’s goal is to open public debate to new voices and to change the polarized panorama of Colombian politics.

Colombia’s news media faces four major problems. Its first significant issue is that the media industry (i.e. radio, TV, the press, and digital media) is controlled by an oligopoly of four conglomerates with longstanding ties to the country’s economic and political elite. Even though Colombian society has changed over the last 30 years and new entrepreneurial groups have emerged, the media are still dominated by the long-entrenched political and economic elite. Media company owners have close ties with government officials and most advertising contracts flow to these established and conveniently connected players.A second problem present in Colombian media is the lack of independent journalism. Colombia’s traditional media, with some exceptions like Semana magazine, do little in-depth research and political analysis that could promote better critical thinking on politics, the economy, and urgent social issues. They ably report the news per se, but not the stories behind the news. Media companies’ political connections discourage balanced reporting and diverse sourcing. As a result, few are seen as reliable sources of information.At the same time, there is a polarized public discourse that permeates public debate and discourages participation from new actors. There is no lack of public debate in Colombia, but it tends to be highly polarized between the right and the left. Voices representing centrists and more balanced perspectives are lost between the extremes, discouraging participation among youth.In addition, young people lack interest in deepening the information related to politics and economics that they receive. They are interested in being informed about the more urgent and relevant matters in their country and abroad, but the narratives of conventional political newspapers and magazines do not attract young audiences. Up to now, digital media has not been successful in disseminating balanced news that is appealing to young people.

To solve the problems present in Colombian media, Juanita has created La Silla Vacia, a new model for independent and participative journalism. It is an online project that, by combining professional reporting with high-level discourse and broad citizen participation, aims to offer in-depth information in real-time to enable broad political debate. It is a pioneering, new standard in the Andean region, focused squarely on exposing how political power is executed.La Silla Vacia is a 2.0 interactive website that gathers a diverse spectrum of perspectives from professional journalists and distinguished experts in various relevant fields. At the same time, it encourages citizens, especially young people, to participate in the public discourse.La Silla Vacia is comprised of five sections, each presenting materials from a different source. The Desde la Silla (From the Chair) section is staffed by professional journalists who post researched fact-based stories every day. La Movida del Día (The Move of the Day) attracts the most important power brokers and opinion makers, representing a broad range of political views, to join in a discussion of the nation’s most important issues. El Blogueo (The Blog) section somewhat parallels the U.S. Huffington Post, with an active and growing network of prestigious young economists, security experts, human rights activists, and other young specialists whose blogs stimulate public discussion. In La Butaca (The Stool) through the section Esto no es Bonito (This is Not Pretty), Juanita is attracting a network of artists (i.e. 20 so far from diverse art fields) whose work reflects political criticism. Their work is posted as a digital exhibition. Finally, Zona de Usuarios (Users Zone) is where the community of users write articles edited by a professional editor of La Silla Vacía. In addition, Mi Puesto (My Place) is the community section in which citizens create personal profiles and track their activities across La Silla Vacia. To measure their participation they earn points for posting comments, emailing stories to friends, uploading videos on issues of political matters, or participating in reporting projects.Juanita and her team work continuously to attract new contributors. Their goal is to engage future leaders and opinion makers—young academics, legislative staffers, advisers to ministers, and judicial clerks as “super-users,” building a community with fresh perspectives and credibility. By the end of 2009, with coaching from La Silla Vacia’s staff, these super-users are expected to produce at least 30 percent of the site’s total content.La Silla Vacia is not a partisan project. Although its reporting often informs one point of view or another, it is not aligned ideologically with a single position or party, as are other online newspapers and blogs. Its blogging community, as well as La Movida del Dia, include voices from across the political spectrum. They come from the left-of-center or right-wing organizations, ODECOFI, to the conservative Luis Guillermo Vélez or the former press secretary Ricardo Galán, of former President Álvaro Uribe.Juanita has been working to develop La Silla Vacia as a new model in media since 2008, but La Silla Vacia has been online for only a short time. However, it has realized remarkable impact. Its website has had 435,890 distinct visitors, and its articles have been cited in the nation’s most important newspapers and magazines, from the conservative El Nuevo Siglo to Semana.com, El Tiempo, El Espectador, El Nuevo Dia, Gatopardo, Revista Arcadia and MSN. Juanita was recently elected as “Women of the Year” by the women’s magazine, Fucsia of Semana publishing house for her work with La Silla Vacia.The La Movida del Dia section has engaged 60 of the nation’s most important decision-makers and 14 high-profile bloggers write regularly on the economy, media, security and justice, the environment, and so on. Among those are Juan Carlos Flóres, former Bogota councilman, mayoral candidate and urban expert, and César Caballero, who resigned as director of the National Statistics Institute, when compelled to inflate economic indicators. The Blogoeconomía blog is written by nine economists from CEDE, the prestigious think-tank of the Faculty of Economy of La Universidad de los Andes.Mi Puesto has 12,990 users registered and La Silla Vacia has more than 10,000 followers on Facebook and 15,000 on Twitter. Some of these users have participated in La Silla Vacia’s news reporting, e.g. one reported on the public audience of a general accused in the disappearance of several people in the Palace of Justice attack in 1985; another, written collaboratively by several users, described an effort at political reform.La Silla Vacia’s reporting staff aims to tell stories that no one else will tell. One story exposed efforts by Colombia’s Agriculture Minister to restructure rural agency staff in a way that would better support his upcoming presidential campaign, leaving hundreds of government officials out of work. Another story described the national intelligence agency’s systematic spying on human right’s organizations. A third revealed companies that had financed the referendum to re-elect the president.Despite its short trajectory, La Silla Vacia has published stories that were scoops in Colombia. Juanita’s journalists were the first to tell the story of how former President Álvaro Uribe’s sons were displacing garbage recyclers from the market. They were also first to identify who was behind a provision of a bill that benefited the wealthy owners of an electricity business. La Silla Vacia discovered that several companies that had financed the president’s elections had received special tax exemptions for a palm oil business. And La Silla Vacía had the biggest scoop of the year, when it revealed one day in advance that the Constitutional Court was going to declare unconstitutional the referendum to allow President Uribe for a third term. That news had been the most anticipated for months.Juanita and her team are working on developing new narratives to make their stories more appealing to young audiences without losing the quality of the analysis. La Silla Vacia’s objective is to engage all generations, especially young people, in public debate, so new voices can be heard and democracy can be strengthened.Juanita started La Silla Vacia with a grant from the Open Society Institute, and some for her life savings. To support the website, she created a business unit with a different team that does not work in La Silla Vacía but in the company Blogosfera Producciones S.A.S that helps sustain the journalistic work of La Silla Vacía with consulting services to companies in the use of web technologies and web logics. In a brief period of time, Juanita has been able to commercially sustain more than half of journalistic operations with these consulting services and with workshops and training in online journalism. This is a major success for independent media and proof that such models can be sustainable, given the Colombian context where most of the flows from advertising go to well-connected and established media companies.In its short life, La Silla Vacia has reached the peak of 2 million views and 450,000 users a month during election time. After elections, La Silla Vacía has stabilized around 120,000 unique users and 700,000 pageviews a month. Juanita’s objective is to have 200,000 frequent users, 1 million views per month during her second year. She wants to position La Silla Vacia as the most consulted news source for every citizen’s interest in the country’s development as well as an example of new journalism inside and outside Colombia.By selecting and inviting more prestigious bloggers, especially from regions outside Bogota, Juanita expects to address a broader audience. She is focused on attracting professional journalists, students, and environmentalists to her project. As a member of the Fundación Iberoamericana de Periodismo, Juanita aims to share her experience and methodology to spread regionally.

Juanita comes from a family of business entrepreneurs and immigrants (World War II refugees). She studied law at the Andes University in Bogota, and, as a budding entrepreneur, she created Alter Ego magazine dedicated to the presentation of law-related topics from non-juristic perspectives. Juanita was also a co-founder of the Opción Colombia organization, which acted as a bridge between city hall offices and the university when a decentralization process was getting underway. During the same period, she also gathered stories she later used to produce a TV series, Tiempos Dificiles (Hard Times).

Juanita completed a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University in New York City, and then worked for the Wall Street Journal’s Americas edition. On her own initiative and drawing on her own savings, she traveled to South Africa to cover the three-month Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Juanita then returned to Colombia, where she has held several posts in the media industry.

Juanita is a former editor of the Semana magazine and El Tiempo newspaper. While a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she began working on the idea of La Silla Vacia, and soon after returning to Colombia, she launched during the run-up to Colombia’s 2010 Presidential Election.

Juanita has published two books on the war in Colombia. Her first, No somos machos pero somos muchos, is about the civil resistance of indigenous communities against the guerrillas. Her second, Country of Bullets, is a comprehensive book on the contemporary conflict of her country. It won the third prize of the prestigious Ulysses Lettre-Award for Literary Journalism in Berlin, and was published in English by New Mexico University Press.