01 / Story
How it started
File note · 2014 · United States
In 2014 I was a student in the United States, and some of my closest friends were Venezuelan. Their families had sent them away from a country in crisis.
Yet in French media, that crisis was almost invisible. To understand what my friends were going through, I had to read the news in Spanish.
That gap became my question, and it still is: who decides what is newsworthy, and whose lives don't make the cut?
I went looking for answers in journalism. I studied in Bordeaux and Valencia, and started reporting in Bordeaux, in Warsaw, and for Arte's weekly programme Vox Pop.
Then came a master's across Denmark, Wales and Chile, specialising in war and conflict reporting. In Chile I also started investigating public-interest stories with La Pública. Everywhere I went, I saw the same thing: the people at the centre of a story were often the ones with the least say in how it was told.
Reporting on my own wasn't going to change that. So I trained as a trainer, in journalists' safety and then in solutions journalism and Complicating the Narratives. I started teaching at university, and in 2022 I founded aidóni.
Today I spend most of my time helping other journalists, students and organisations ask the question I asked in 2014, and do something about the answer.