Mensagem de Lisboa

The Mensagem de Lisboa is a local, community-based digital media outlet covering Lisbon and written from the communities' point of view. "We wanted to create room to hear the voices of the people living in Lisbon. We work closely with our readers, who may even write for our website," the director Catarina Carvalho says.Some of Mensagem de Lisboa's innovations in community and local journalism include newsroom meetings and tours around the city with readers and chronicles written by residents of Lisbon not represented in traditional media, like a homeless man or an Afghan refugee. The team also translates part of its articles into the Creole language, which appeals to the African communities and African descent living in Lisbon and its outskirts. Furthermore, the organisation is about to launch a project to train young journalists from low-income families.Before creating the Mensagem de Lisboa, Catarina Carvalho was the director of the newspaper Diário de Notícias; when Catarina took over, she decided to reinforce that local connection. "I was very convinced the future of journalism happens locally," Carvalho says. She abandoned Diário de Notícias when the board of administrators didn't agree with her vision.The owner of the historical Lisbon caffé A Brasileira, the symbolic headquarters for writer Fernando Pessoa and his group of intellectuals in the XX century, reached out to Catarina and challenged her to create a local newspaper about Lisbon. Together, they called the media outlet Messagem, a reference to Message, one of the most important works of Fernando Pessoa. That was the start of Mensagem de Lisboa, which, a little more than a year after its launch, reached more than 850,000 unique users.In 2022, the Mensagem de Lisboa received Portugal's most important journalistic award, Prémio Gazeta, in the local media category.