Jornalismo cultural em Cuiabá : experiências de cobertura dos 300 anos em veículos digitais

Abstract

This research analyzes cultural journalism from Cuiabá, capital of Mato Grosso, focusing on the great event of the 300 years of Cuiabá, in the year 2019, in two different digital vehicles: Cidadão Cultura, an alternative website, and Olhar Conceito, a traditional website, definitions based on current characteristics of journalism identified locally. Methodologically, we activated the Journalistic Coverage Analysis (ACJ) protocol to identify verification marks and product composition, as well as aspects of contextual characterization, based on three categories of analysis: journalistic objectivity in cultural journalism; the selection of sources in the coverage of the 300 years; and the territorialities and singularity of the event. We draw a representative panorama of Cuiabá cultural scenes, especially in the year of the tercentenary, as well as experiences and conceptions of Cuiabá journalists in relation to the studied phenomenon – in order to seek a characterization of a peripheral cultural journalism and, consequently, marginalized from the production of knowledge. Already in the analyses, we identified in the Olhar Conceito a coverage that makes use of aspects that are very specific to the history of Cuiabá, by guiding episodes and characters that make up the popular imagination about the city. On the other hand, it reinforces consensual and official discourses – with an excess of press relations from municipal authorities – about a culture linked to coloniality. Cidadão Cultura, on the other hand, while striving to legitimize an active cultural life in the city – especially through cultural itineraries –, is based on criticism, provoking displacements of common sense with a more authorial, reflective and experimental content that it considers the subjectivities. Both initiatives, to a greater or lesser extent, demonstrate processes of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as well as difficulties in making peripheral cultures visible. In this sense, the findings lead us to reflect on how the mutations in contemporary journalism, which result from growing and different movements of precariousness, imply the questioning of regulations that limit rather than enhance their practices in the digital environment. It also emphasizes the need to study the modes of production/financing of cultural journalism in peripheral territories and to rethink the conceptualization of journalistic specialization from the experiences of “local” journalism. It is precisely in this “local” forged in marginalization that a potent cultural journalism seems to reside, which, in turn, points to possibilities for overcoming challenges presented to journalistic practice today.