Our Crowdfunding Groups
LAND, the Latin America News Dispatch, seeks funding to pay our journalists — the NYU students, alumni and freelancers from throughout Latin America and the Caribbean — who make this publication possible. Paying our journalists is a standard we have committed to uphold. Even with the essential support we receive from NYU Journalism and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, we need your help to sustain this student-led, go-to Latinx news source in English for the journalists, diplomats, academics, activists, analysts and all the interested readers, users and listeners we serve.
We have the funds to get LAND through the summer. Our goal is to raise $20,000, which will cover the 2020 fall semester. Exceeding this figure will enable us to bank some funds so that we can publish more enterprise and help cover 2021 and beyond.
Since LAND's inception in 2009, it has distinguished itself as one of the only consistent, concise daily English-language sources of news and insights about Latin America, the Caribbean and Latinx issues in the United States.
As the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, LAND brings news and updates about the virus's impact on the region in its daily newsletter. On latindispatch.com, LAND publishes stories from journalists throughout Latin America, including recent stories about how Rio's favelas are bracing for the coronavirus and the Nicaraguan government's lackluster response to the impending health crisis.
If you haven't already, follow us on Twitter and Facebook and subscribe to LAND's free newsletter Today in Latin America (sign up here).
We are expanding! Our newsletter's subscriber list has grown more than 20 percent in the last year — and more than 100 percent — in the last two years. It maintains an open rate of nearly 30 percent, which is about twice the industry average. Writers with expertise from the NYU community and well beyond produce the reportage, analyses and photo essays we feature on the main LAND site.
We've been able to broaden our reach well beyond our own via Futuro Media/NPR's Latino USA and Futuro's Latino Rebels, which carry our newsletter and much of our enterprise reporting.
Why do we need the funding we seek? We have great back-end tech support, workspace, equipment and help paying freelancers from the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and from the Journalism master's degree program known as GloJo, for Global and Joint Program Studies, from which much of the LAND leadership comes. One of GloJo’s eight partner programs in the NYU Faculty of Arts and Science, the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, or CLACS, generously covers the cost of our editor-in-chief for the fall and spring semesters.
But the work requires many more hands.
The newsletter is the project’s most vibrant, heavily trafficked feature, involving a LAND team of up to 20 undergraduate and graduate students and freelancers who rotate through the schedule at the university-mandated rates of $15-$20 per hour. It's our major expense at about $900 per week. Our journalists comb the news from the regions in Spanish, Portuguese and English every weekday night. They make the editorial decisions, translate and write concise, informative summaries, and our editors distribute it every weekday morning. An added benefit: because LAND is university-based, it’s one of the few legally permissible opportunities for those from abroad on student visas to be able to receive payment for professional-quality journalistic work.
In recent years, through support from a single GloJo donor’s start-up gift, we’ve been able to cover the services we’ve needed, afford major beyond-budget enterprise projects and underwrite the newsletter. The donor’s gift also made it possible for us to continue (with just one staffer working 20 hours per week) to publish the newsletter over the summer months for the first time in 2018, something we'd like to be able to keep doing in 2020.
LAND is a vital resource for its readers as well as its young journalists. We believe this work matters and should be compensated. Please consider supporting the project so it can continue past August.
Decorate your bag or jacket with a LAND button and show your support for journalists who cover Latin America and the Caribbean. Donors who give $25 or more will receive a button.
