Introducing Pirate Wire Services!
There are dozens of stories behind every headline. We’re here to tell them
Saludos!
We’re a collective of independent journalists who report on Latin America for the international media. From San Salvador to Buenos Aires, we spend our lives hitting the streets, chasing politicians and scouring documents to bring you breaking news and hard-hitting features from across the region.
Every Latin American country is unique, and no two reporters approach their work in quite the same way. But as we got talking, we realized we had one thing in common: for every piece we reported, dozens of stories were going untold.
Sometimes, the editors we approach tell us frankly that they’re swamped, or that a major catastrophe has chased everything else off the page. At others, dozens of people share their stories with us and it just isn’t possible to do them all justice in a short news dispatch.
We believe they deserve to be heard. That’s why we created Pirate Wire Services.
By the end of the year, we’re hoping to launch the Pirate Wire Podcast, a medium-length podcast of rich, detailed narrative journalism about rebel currents and the fight over lives, land and labour. Told from protests, barrios, coca fields, soup kitchens and hospitals, we go wherever the story takes us, putting the voices of local people and communities front and center.
While we work on our first season, we’re getting the ball rolling with a series of shorter posts of original journalism. They’ll be hitting your inboxes every Friday, so subscribe to our substack to stay up to date.
For now, we’d like to introduce our team.
Joshua Collins:
I’m currently based in Bogotá, Colombia. I report often from conflict zones in Colombia covering social movements, immigration, the impact of crime on human rights and state violence. I’ve been at a host of global media companies including USA Today, VICE, AJ+ and more.
When I’m not breathing tear gas or visiting coca regions I’m generally at home in Bogotá drinking far too much Colombian coffee, to which I am hopelessly addicted. You can find my work here.
Amy Booth:
I’m a freelance journalist with one foot in the social sector. My writing and photography has been published in international outlets including The Guardian, Vice, the BBC, the Lancet and New Internationalist. Since 2018 I’ve been based in Argentina, where I’m finishing up a masters in Political and Social Theory at the University of Buenos Aires. Before that, I was based in Cochabamba, Bolivia, writing and running the youth circus programme at Fundación EnseñARTE. Alongside my reporting, I’m currently writing up my masters thesis and cooking at my community soup kitchen. Check out my website here.
John Dennehy
I see writing as a form of activism; journalism as a form of education. My objective is to tell important stories that are not receiving the attention they deserve. I have bylines in publications such as Vice, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera. My memoir, Illegal: a true story of love, revolution and crossing borders, set in Ecuador, has won numerous awards. I’m currently based in El Salvador where I am founding an international Bitcoin education school.
Keep an eye out for next week’s update, when Josh will be looking at why so many journalists are being killed in Mexico.
¡Hasta luego!