By Mariana Santos
Working in newsrooms with a
multidisciplinary team of developers, journalists and designers became my
everyday life when I was part of the Guardian Interactive team over
the last three years.
This began with my former boss, Alastair Dant, who had the vision not only to
start the Guardian Interactive team, but who recognized the need to place a woman
in a key position on his team.
This changed my life. It gave me the chance to
work with a genius and to see that being a woman was actually making a
difference in our everyday work environment, as we created news stories using
cutting-edge technology and a disruptive attitude towards communication.
This made me want to share this
experience with other women. I feel that women, especially in the Latin world,
are the first to cut our own wings and prevent ourselves from dreaming big and
from believing we can go far in our careers.
I am not sure if it is due to
humility or a lack of confidence, or maybe even an overdose of high
expectations and an obsession with perfection! Our society does enough of that,
making it harder for women to get ahead in high-level management and in some
technical jobs. I believe we need to be the first ones to believe in ourselves.
That's why I'm launching “Chicas
Poderosas” ("Powerful Women") in Latin America as part of my ICFJ Knight International Journalism
Fellowship. I am calling on the best professionals I've worked with
to the same table, so we can share our stories about how we got where we are
and how it is possible for any girl to get where she wants as well.
We'll share some tools and processes
that are specific to the roles we are talking about: data mining, scraping,
development for interactive features, investigative techniques, visual
storytelling techniques, and more.
However, mainly we aim to gather a group of
strangers with different skills in order to work together, embrace change and
celebrate the possibility of developing news stories. These stories may be
interactive, animated or simple data visualizations, using all the skills
taught by the team where the participants learn how to develop a process where
everyone contributes to a better product.
The other goal of Chicas Poderosas is
to start a network where people can keep in contact, keep developing and keep
sharing knowledge.
Chicas Poderosas aims to start a
chapter in each Latin American country with representatives who will work as
ambassadors spreading knowledge and the philosophy of embracing teamwork,
believing in women who can make a change in the technical environment in
newsrooms. The idea is to empower women to believe in themselves and to work
hard. We want to empower that proactive attitude, entrepreneurial spirit.
We came to the conclusion that the goal
of “perfection” is the enemy of “great,” as sometimes being too detail-oriented
leads us to not do something at all if we think it is not going to be awesome.
I believe sometimes we need to allow ourselves to do something even if it's not
perfect. We can say that at least we tried! And if we learn through failure,
then we can always launch version 2.0!
This post originally appeared on the
Global Voices website and was published on IJNet with permission.
Mariana Santos is a visual storyteller
and founder of Chicas Poderosas, which she is developing as a Knight International Journalism Fellow.
Photo courtesy of Mariana Santos.
Source: Ijnet.org
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