Consortium of press vehicles completes two years

The consortium of press vehicles for the dissemination of Covid data in Brazil completes, this Wednesday (8), two years. The unprecedented and historic union of SheetUOL, O Estado de S. Paulo, Extra, O Globo and G1 took place at a time when the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government was taking actions that reduced the quantity and quality of data available on Covid in Brazil.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government published information on cases and deaths related to Covid on a portal. However, amid the evolution of the disease in the country, it started to delay the daily disclosure of data.

The time, initially, was at 17:00 (management of Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta). It went to 19:00 and then to 22:00. The late schedule made it difficult to publish data on television news and print vehicles and, consequently, impacted the information passed on to the public.

“The story is over in Jornal Nacional”, President Bolsonaro even said, in a mocking tone, when commenting on the change, in June 2020, days before the official start of the consortium.

The portal with Covid data in Brazil was down for more than 19 hours. Upon his return, the history with the evolution of the pandemic in the country had disappeared and only the total number of cases registered on the day in question was included. Other information that no longer appeared was deaths by notification date and epidemiological week, some of the basic data on the disease. There was also no longer the option to download the data.

The vehicles then teamed up to seek information on the disease directly with the states and the Federal District. Each of them was responsible for a group of federative entities.

The group also started to use direct collection with the states as a tool for transparency and regularity in the dissemination of data. For example, it was thanks to this constant monitoring that G1 and Sheet verified and reported an abyss between the numbers of Covid cases registered by the capital of São Paulo and the values ​​that the state of São Paulo pointed to the city.

With the advance of the pandemic, in addition to the data on cases and deaths, the consortium also brought some more hopeful information: the vaccination numbers against Covid – which had a considerably slow start in the country, after, once again, obstacles and lack of federal government action.

The unprecedented union of Brazilian vehicles was recognized.

At the end of 2021, the worst year of the pandemic in Brazil, with very high death rates, the consortium received the title of media of the year, in the specialized media modality of the Aberje (Brazilian Association of Business Communication) award.

Also at the end of 2021, the consortium, with the Comprova Project, received the ANJ (National Association of Newspapers) Award for freedom of the press.

In 2022, he competed for the Sigma Awards, an international award for data journalism. The international award highlighted the speed with which the teams were formed for the daily collection of data and the fact that this is an unprecedented partnership between competing press vehicles.

“Journalism’s mission to inform the population, however, made it necessary to take action at a decisive moment in the midst of the pandemic”, says the award’s website, which, however, was not won by the consortium. “The daily collaboration between newsrooms around a common goal makes the consortium a unique initiative.”