Brazil: Young journalists report on the World Cup | Latin America | DW | 14.07.2014
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Brazil: Young journalists report on the World Cup

The World Cup project "Once Amigos" was not only a fantastic reporting opportunity for young journalists, it also allowed them to form strong friendships. Participant Robin Hartmann shares his experiences.

Workshop participant Janeth Lozada from Ecuador interviews a protester in Rio Branco (photo: Wagner Arratia).

Workshop participant Janeth Lozada from Ecuador interviews a protester in Rio Branco

There are certain moments in life that you'll never forget - where you'll always remember where you were, what you were doing, how you were thinking, and what you felt. For those who took part in the "Once Amigos" ("Eleven Friends") project, this moment came on a Monday morning - at least it did for me. That morning, I'd arrived at work in a slightly bad mood - it was Monday morning, after all. As usual, I started the day by checking my emails.

I read the email from project manager David Olmos at least 20 times and then checked it again every five minutes or so to make sure it was real. Even then, I wasn't sure it wasn't something I'd dreamed up, a possibility which seemed more plausible than the reality.

The email informed me I'd been chosen, along with 21 other journalists from Germany and Latin America, to go to the 2014 soccer World Cup in Brazil. It was a bilingual project with the aim of covering this huge event. And it offered a few fringe benefits that surely every one of us has dreamed of: samba, sandy beaches and sunburn. After reading the email, I wanted to pack my suitcase and head to the airport straight away, with a Caipirinha at the terminal to get in the right spirit.

Cold feet, warm reception

Robin Hartmann (center) with Pablo López Hurtado from Venezuela (left) and Juan Felipe López from Colombia (right) (photo: DW Akademie).

Robin Hartmann (center) with Pablo López Hurtado from Venezuela (left) and Juan Felipe López from Colombia (right)

But before diving into Brazil's heat, we had a stint in the cold - well, it was cold for the 11 participants from Latin America, who now I can truly call friends. The first part of the project took place in December 2012 at DW Akademie in Bonn, where we received training in multimedia reporting and undertook our first team research projects. These group activities got us talking to one another and we soon discovered our similarities and differences.

Even in those early days, our work together was marked by warmth and a feeling of mutual respect. Our project, which was exciting enough in itself, became a real adventure because of this. Our differing approaches sometimes collided but instead of insisting that our point of view was the right one, we began to learn from one another. Every opinion held by our 22-strong team counted. Everyone brought new ideas and helped build the foundations of what would later become our multimedia blog.

Today, more than one-and-a-half years later, the blog "Once Amigos" contains stories about soccer that have informed our audience and even expanded our own horizons. The stories tell of youths who have given up everything to pursue their dream of becoming a professional soccer player, give accounts of Maracanazo, the World Cup final Brazil lost in 1950, and profile pastors who wear soccer jerseys under their cassocks. The breadth of the stories is exciting and surprising even to us and show how magnificent and diverse football, and a project like this, can be.

Once colleagues, now friends

Renata Martins from Brazil gets up close with footballer Brazilian Tiago Cametá (photo: Lukas Stege).

Renata Martins from Brazil gets up close with footballer Brazilian Tiago Cametá

Many of us took advantage of this opportunity to get travel around the continent and get to know it better. I visited nearly all of South America and visited many of my friends from the project. Because, of course, "Once Amigos" was not all about work - the team members got along famously and we established strong personal bonds, which still hold today. I can honestly say we probably got to know the local nightlife as well as we got to know our offices. In fact, several of our best ideas surfaced during beers we had together after work.

Our close relationships and support for one another helped us overcome difficulties, such as the sometimes challenging work conditions, cockroach-plagued hotels, the frustration of uploading videos via mobile phone, stampeding crowds and a robbery on a beach. These were small setbacks in comparison with the pride we felt in the project. The fruits of our common labor always tasted as sweet as they did on the first day.

The value of the 18 months we spent working on the project certainly surpassed anything we would have gained through daily editorial work or even from a well-paid journalism job. Personally, the most valuable thing I experienced was the transformation of my 11 Latin American colleagues, once colegas, to 11 friends, once amigos.


"Once Amigos" brought together eleven young journalists from Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela) and eleven from Germany to provide coverage of the 2014 Soccer World Cup in Brazil. The DW Akademie project was divided into four phases: in 2012, the participants met for the first time in Bonn to prepare a concept for a multimedia blog. In June 2013, the participants met for the Confederations Cup in Brazil. Then, two-person teams undertook research at the end of 2013 on individual soccer stories in Latin America. The final phase was reporting from the actual World Cup venues in Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Brasilia, Salvador, Fortaleza, Recife and Rio de Janeiro. The "Once Amigos" multimedia project was financed by Germany's Federal Foreign Office.

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  • Date 14.07.2014
  • Author Robin Hartmann / kj
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  • Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1Ccgq
  • Date 14.07.2014
  • Author Robin Hartmann / kj
  • Print Print this page
  • Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1Ccgq