Innovation in journalism became an important element to determine the current and future direction of the profession. Through incremental and cumulative transformations over time, because of many obstacles faced inside the newsrooms, journalism has suffered from significant and fundamental changes, including the deployment of data journalism. In Latin America, the practice has seen an increasing expansion in the last years. Nevertheless, there are important technological gaps that limit its development. The present study draws upon literature on data journalism, media management, and sociology, aiming to contribute theoretically to data journalism research. Our findings show that beyond the technological approach, practitioners are relying on data evangelists, collaboration, and audience-centered innovation to produce data storytelling in their newsrooms. On the other hand, these alliances form "homophily" and "endogamy" features that limit the dissemination of the practice, which must consider the potential implications for the social distance of the audiences. It argues that Latin American professionals are distancing themselves from technological determinism to embrace a more audience-centric innovation in newsrooms. Finally, it also states that it is important to take into account those limitations, as they pose obstacles for data journalism innovation research knowledge. The article concludes with an agenda for future research.

In Brazil, inequalities are visually represented in its favelas. These neighborhoods are usually comprised of low-income informal settlements neglected by governments and often forgotten by mainstream media. The pervasive nature of information and communications technology (ICT) has brought new ways to produce news content in the media industry, giving voice to these communities. Thus, small, alternative, community, or nonmainstream media became a vital terrain of opposition activism. Drawing on user participation, collaboration, and data journalism theories, this article analyzes three alternative media organizations (Agência Mural, data_labe, and Favela em Pauta), which proposed producing data-driven content by, for, and about favelas through a mixed-method research design. Results show that four contributing factors tend to help these organizations to produce data stories despite these challenges: citizen participation, activism, collaboration, and humanizing data. The article concludes by demonstrating how elements developed in these initiatives and presents an agenda for future research.

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The practice of collaboration in journalism is not new. The developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) are understood by many scholars as the critical factor for collaborative journalism to flourish across newsrooms. By working together, practitioners can address the challenges of a profession in crisis as well as the need to produce quality investigative reporting. Much of the academic discussion regarding cooperative efforts in journalism has happened in the US and Europe. This paper aims to shed light on collaborative journalism outside this region, focusing on Latin America. To conduct our study, we looked at the literature concerning collaborative journalism in the Scopus and Scielo databases to build a survey that was shared among Latin American practitioners who worked on collaborative projects in recent years. Our findings show that Latin American news organisations are taking part or forming collaborative efforts to share a set of practices, processes, and motivations. However, their motivations are different from their Western counterparts, as Latin American journalists are looking for ways to fulfil the normative role of journalism in society and occupying spaces left by the mainstream media. By doing so, practitioners focus on topics and communities that are often misrepresented, forgotten, or underreported in the media. Finally, our paper concludes by suggesting a profile of news outlets working on collaborative projects across the region, and we provide some directions for future research.

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