El Pitazo

This independent digital media outlet, which began operations in December 2014, has correspondents in several states of Venezuela and the Capital District, and focuses on telling stories of citizens, especially residents of the most underserved areas, through its 12 content distribution channels. The value of El Pitazo is its extensive network of journalists, the largest in the country, and through which they gain access to stories with first-hand sources. They complement this regional coverage with the approach to politics, the economy, health, events, sports, culture, shows and a migration section, in which they cover relevant information for Venezuelans living outside of Venezuela. It has 42 people on its staff, including correspondents, web editors, community managers, designers, social networks, audiovisual producers, editors and news audio producers. Digital information is multiplied in traditional media thanks to an alliance achieved with 23 others. stations in different states of Venezuela, which reproduce the microphones and news audios.El Pitazo was born as a YouTube channel, but it progressively expanded to broadcast, today, multimedia content through a radio program (in open and digital signal), Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Telegram, TikTok, two newsletters, in addition to its website, which is constantly updated and visited by more than two million users per month. In February 2016, they published an exclusive video to show the levels critics of the La Pereza reservoir, first video news made in Venezuela with the support of a drone. In their ten years, they have reached more than 211 thousand subscribers on YouTube. Since the electrical blackout that affected a large part of Venezuela, for several months in 2019, together with infocitizens (trained in their workshops), they created flipcharts: sheets of paper that they paste on walls or billboards in publicly accessible places, with relevant headlines to inform communities that were disconnected. To do this, they have two people who make up the El Pitazo en la Calle program. This team also coordinates the infocitizen training workshops that were held in person in the communities and which, since May 2021, began to be carried out digitally. In times of coronavirus, they transformed their Café con El Pitazo, which they did in person in community venues, into two weekly forum chats that they hold with speakers on topics consulted by the more than 800 participants per room. They have also dedicated themselves to developing a line of performative journalism, with which they produce plays that tell real stories of the popular sectors, which are dramatized by professional actors and presented in communities, in theaters and, since the pandemic, through YouTube. Since before the pandemic, the team worked under the teleworking modality, with a small coordination in Caracas. César Batiz, director of the medium, also explains that this project began its operation with seed capital from IPYS, Institute of Press and Society, and Trapiche Film, a commercial producer. But they have been diversifying their income from projects and research, they have income from programmatic advertising, fixed advertising, sponsored content, events and a membership model, which they started in 2020 with the idea of ​​forming the SuperAliados community. In 2020, they formed the Strategy and Business team, with 4 people dedicated to membership, sales and marketing. Since 2015, El Pitazo and its staff have been the subject of physical and cyber attacks, as well as verbal and legal threats made by political leaders and some businessmen. One of the events that has caused the most damage to the digital medium is the blocking of four domains (elpitazo.com, elpitazo.info, elpitazo.ml and elpitazo.net), which has forced the members of the organization to constantly reinvent themselves to overcome censorship. In 2019, they won the Ortega y Gasset Prize, the Gabo Prize and the Speed ​​Fund. The latter allowed them to implement the membership model. In 2022 they were accelerated by the Elevate fund, an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (Icfj) and were winners of the third edition of the Google News Initiative's Innovation Challenge. In addition, in 2024 they were one of the media accelerated by the Enhanced Fundamentals Lab of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and were creators of Venezuela Vota, the largest project for the dissemination and union of digital media in Latin America to review all the events of the presidential elections in Venezuela.