Strategies

ANDI pursues a number of strategies that are both integrated and feed back into each other. ANDI strives to develop medium- and long-term initiatives in a manner that enables the different strategies to be leveraged – and to be sure, this is a core reason underlying the highly successful outcomes achieved over 15 years of engagement in issues related to children and adolescents and other areas of the social-environmental agenda. Initiatives undertaken on just one or two of these strategies can produce positive outcomes that often serve as a first step – exploratory field work – toward the adoption of multiple possibilities and tools. The various strategies adopted encompass:

1. Mobilization
2. Monitoring
3. Capacity Building
4. Advocacy
5. Reapplication

1. Mobilization

ANDI interacts on a daily basis with newsrooms and other information sources to set the agenda and disseminate the most important news stories. ANDI serves to promote certain issues, as well as provides help deskservices to journalists and social organizations. The various activities are based on the principle that pursuing public information of the highest quality is a shared responsibility of reporters, editors, and information sources and that good journalism must be founded on a diversity of perspectives and voices.

For example, ANDI’s objective in the projects launched in the area of children’s and youth issues is to contribute toward transforming the dialogue between social actors and journalists – and communicators in general, when required – into the production of high quality content on matters affecting the lives of boys, girls, and adolescents. The same principle applies to content directed specifically to these segments.

Promoting investigative journalism, access to privileged information, awards, and other forms of recognition – for both the best products and journalists dedicated to the field – is a task ANDI performs using rigorous criteria, driven by the principle that elevating the prestige of public interest issues and the professionals devoted to their coverage is essential.

2. Monitoring

ANDI’s investment in developing quantitative and qualitative monitoring methodologies for journalistic content is founded on the view that providing news professionals and media outlets with critical, rigorous, structured, and constructive analyses of their editorial tendencies is of fundamental value. Above all, this approach enables the correction of deficiencies in the investigative process due to poor journalistic training and practices. At the same time, it offers an effective means to alert journalists to the possibility of accessing new knowledge and testing different approaches to the issues in question.

Media analyses are mainly focused on daily newspapers and magazines, although some projects have also given special attention to television news. The surveys allow each media outlet to reflect on its work and to compare itself with the overall averages for the sector and, in certain cases, with one or more specific outlets. The monitoring studies also help media outlets to identify the areas to which they need to devote greater attention.

While over the years ANDI’s news analyses have offered news organizations a tool to track their progress, they have also provided the organization with valuable input regarding which issues – or media channels – require additional mobilizing and training efforts. Indeed, it is on the basis of these evaluations – and not the individual preferences of ANDI staff – that key strategies and new projects are identified. By the same token, the analyses are the means ANDI employs to monitor its own efforts.

The consistency of ANDI’s periodic reports clearly contributes to conferring on the organization itsstatus as a legitimate and impartial mediator between journalists and other social actors.

3. Capacity Building

The complexity and diversity of the children’s and youth agenda, as well as of the associated issues underlying various aspects of the sustainable human development agenda, require specific professional communications skills, so as to provide the public with contextualized information deserving of recognition, prioritize the issues incorporated in the public debate, and oversee government officials and the policies they implement.

Assisting the media in mitigating some of their limitations in a manner that fosters exploration of original journalistic paths is the driving motivation behind ANDI’s monitoring efforts (media analyses) and training (or capacity building) activities. ANDI organizes seminars to debate the most important issues brought to light by the organization’s studies – through dynamic and interactive formats designed to stimulate journalists and information sources to forge relationships based on greater mutual trust and, in this way, expand their vision and correct deficient practices.

Similarly, ANDI’s ties to the academic community date to 1997, when an intern program was launched – hundreds of students have worked for ANDI in Brasiliaand the numerous member organizations of the ANDI Brazil Network and the ANDI Latin America Network. In 2006, the Student Training Cooperation Program in Journalism (Programa de Cooperação para a Qualificação de Estudantes de Jornalismo – InFormação) was established. The initiative is designed to provide, in partnership with higher learning institutions, training opportunities aimed at establishing an effective interface between the communications field and social issues in Brazil. Among the initiatives covered under the initiative are special course offerings in journalism schools, awards, seminars, colloquiums, databases of academic studies, the publication of reference works, and a grant program for thesis and dissertations. The ties with academia have been further strengthened as publications focused on specific thematic analyses have gained wider dissemination in journalism schools and ANDI, for its part, has become the subject of study for a growing body of undergraduate and graduate research papers.

4. Advocacy

ANDI’s efforts in the fields of communication policies and “communication for development” involve, above all, advocacy work – on behalf of a more democratic, diverse, and pluralistic media system as well as the use of communication tools to promote rights and sustainable human development.

These efforts are rooted in the recognition of the adverse effects arising from the absence of solid regulatory frameworks in connection with technological innovation, the guaranteed freedom of expression, quality journalism, the right to communication, social inclusion, and the media’s representation of different cultures and issues in relation to gender, ethnicity, ideology, and beliefs – which together make up the social fabric.  The problem is particularly acute in Brazil and Latin America – where the absence of legislation coexists with outdated laws, while the lack of full legal enforcement of constitutional provisions is aggravated by noncompliance with existing norms, and, additionally, by low or nonexistent civil society participation in the formulation and evaluation of legal instruments.            

ANDI and the Brazilian and Latin American networks believe that the necessary strides toward a healthy media sector must involve the integration of three interconnected elements: a State regulatory framework; a system of self-regulation and corporate social responsibility; and accountability to society. In this light, the work pursued by ANDI and its networks is based on knowledge generation (above all the analysis of international references against individual national characteristics and features); participation in discussion forums; leadership roles or participation in coordinated measures to promote policies within the various branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial); and training of journalism professionals and social actors, with a view to fostering the understanding that democratic regulatory systems cannot be established to restrict freedom – but must, in fact, be implemented to guarantee those freedoms and the most appropriate conditions for the dissemination of information and knowledge.

5. Reapplication

In recent years, ANDI’s successful development models has been recognized as a “social technology” – in other words, an initiative composed of products, techniques, and/or methodologies capable of being reproduced, and developed in close coordination with communities to offer effective solutions for social change. Currently, ANDI’s children’s and youth “technology” is reproduced and disseminated through the ANDI Brazil Network and the ANDI Latin America Network.

Following a succession of fruitful joint experiences, ANDI is now seeking to create opportunities to transfer its technologies to organizations engaged in other fields of the social-environmental agenda. Among the principles guiding the initiative is the effort to guarantee the implementation of structured and sustainable strategies in the medium and long terms and the necessary follow-up on the execution and effectiveness of the related activities.