Agencia de Noticias dos Direitos da Infancia - ANDI - Brazil

ANDI dialogues with Brazilian media, offering suggestions for news guidelines and encouraging them to praise or denounce social projects. ANDI sees NGOs and their financing agents as allies in the mission to upgrade journalistic coverage pertaining to childhood and adolescence. ANDI strives to increase visibility of social projects, and does so by maintaining permanent contact with professionals working on newspaper supplements, specialised magasines, and television programmes aimed at youngsters.

ANDI's communication-centred work, which in 2005 spanned 11 states in Brazil and 10 countries throughout Latin America, is organised around the following strategic pillars:

1. Mobilisation around the theme of media and social responsibility; work around this theme is informed by a focus on contextualised information, agenda setting, and social control. Specific projects around this theme have included:
   • Daily news themes provided to more than 1,000 journalists across Brazil
   • Monthly bulletins of in-depth news suggestions
   • A permanent help desk offering one-on-one assistance to journalists
   • The "Child-Friendly Journalist Project", which involves recognition of media professionals (327 to date, as of this writing, from all over the country) who champion children's rights issues
   • The Tim Lopes Award for Investigative Journalism Projects on Sexual Violence against Children and Adolescents
2. Media monitoring - for example, the publication of an annual report with data on the strengths and weaknesses of newspaper coverage of child- and youth-related issues (with a ranking based on 18 variables), as well as the production of 18 books with the results of quantitative and qualitative analysis of editorial content on issues such as poverty, violence, education, child labour, drugs, and health. The idea is to give back to the media a perspective of their work in children's rights and to raise awareness among journalists about neglect and misconception in the field.
3. Analysis and capacity building - for example, seminars and workshops on the major social issues related to children and adolescents in which over 1,600 journalists and journalism students have participated.

To describe a few of ANDI's activities in more detail, every 6 months ANDI publishes 'Childhood in the Media' and 'Media of the Youth', highlighting the themes most discussed by the 60 most important newspapers and magazines in Brazil. "Free Radicals" is a bulletin published weekly with summaries of news carried by the 'youth media'. The 'Clipping Analysis' is published weekly for subscribers. A 20-page document, it contains a complete summary of child-related news from newspapers, magazines and television news programmes. It is divided into different areas (Education, Health, Children's Rights, Sexual Exploitation, Drugs, Social Assistance, Violence, etc.)

Advocacy is a core ANDI focus; future plans (2006-2010) include work to spur coverage of the general elections (this could be an opportunity to inspire democratic participation and advocacy for children's rights) as well as promotion of public policies that strengthen social control by the press. ANDI will also work to stimulate debate on Latin America's communication policies, and will lobby media owners to commit themselves to the child rights agenda.

Another ANDI strategy has been interfacing with the academic world. Collaborative experiences have included participation in national meetings of communication researchers, presentations of ANDI's media analysis to universities, support for undergraduate and graduate research, and development (in partnership with universities) of courses on social public policies.

One specific communication tool ANDI draws on in carrying out its work is the internet. ANDI's own website has approximately 8,000 pages as of this writing, with more than 3,000 organisations included in its Informations Databank. The ANDI Latin America Network has its own website, and 2 virtual communities have been established for journalists and students: Acción 17 and Ação 17.