A recipe for respectful journalism
In Colombia’s Putumayo region, where the Andes mountains meet the vast Amazon basin, communities are reclaiming the power to tell their own stories. Instead of waiting for journalists from elsewhere to come, gather information, and leave with their narratives, local storytellers are taking up the microphone and the camera.
The series Territorio del Iaku — iaku means "water" in the Inga language — proposes a collaborative approach to journalistic storytelling, involving local actors and rooted in their cultural heritage. It’s an initiative by Agenda Propia, DW Akademie’s partner in Colombia.
The goal is simple yet transformative: to shift journalism away from extracting information like a mine, and toward strengthening dialogue and benefiting the communities it covers.
Journalism that shares, not extracts
"Sometimes journalism becomes an extractive model: it takes and takes, but doesn’t give back that knowledge," said Edilma Prada, founder of Agenda Propia. "Our work arises from an ethical need to counter such practices," she added.
Instead of imposing external narratives, Agenda Propia proposes a circular approach in which each journalistic piece is built together with the communities, and once completed, a ceremonial handover is held. In these spaces, the final product is shared and the process behind it is explained. In this way, the story is returned to those who lived and told it. For Prada, this final phase is key to validating the work.
"Many times we report from a certain perspective, but we don’t take the time to ask the community whether they felt accurately portrayed or not," she noted.
Storytelling from and for the territory
The series features 15 stories focused on water, a vital and sacred element for many Indigenous cultures. Putumayo is a biodiverse region and a deeply symbolic place, where defending the river is tied to protecting life, identity and memory.
In these stories, more than 40 local voices share ancestral knowledge about caring for water, the challenges of urban growth in rural areas, and how children relate to the spirits of the forest. In fact, spiritual beings and elements of nature appear as living protagonists of the territory, a perspective that breaks with conventional journalism but aligns more closely with Indigenous worldviews.
For Brayan Danilo Coral Jaramillo, a biologist and tour guide who participated as a community storyteller in Territorio del Iaku, these stories foster local cohesion.
"We invite new generations to come together and talk about the importance of caring for the environment, of protecting the territory," he said. "When people love the territory, they’re ready to defend it."
Strengthening identity to build the future
Like Coral, the storytellers in this series are not always professional journalists, but rather farmers, knowledge keepers, artists, or teachers who communicate using local expressions and help strengthen the territory’s identity.
For Jazmín Revelo, a visual artist and educator at a school in Alto Putumayo, these stories reinforce the work they do through education to raise awareness about the importance of caring for the environment.
"For children, seeing themselves reflected in a story helps them value what they do," she said.
To support this, Agenda Propia offers editorial guidance, technical production, and visibility through its platforms. "We do journalism, and we also support and facilitate others to do journalism," added Edilma Prada.
This collaborative work is part of the project Journalism and Protection of the Amazon, developed by DW Akademie in collaboration with local partners Agenda Propia (Colombia), CORAPE (Ecuador), and Servindi (Peru), and supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
