Stop the presses? Journalistic practices in the face of citizen-created content during pulp-mills protest in Argentina and Uruguay

This paper analyzes how activist-created texts and images were assessed and handled by four major Argentinean and Uruguayan newspapers during a longstanding protest against the construction of pulp mills and the monoculture of trees from 2005 until 2009. Based on interviews with the journalists in charge of reporting this protest during four years, as well as with nine activists belonging to the main opposing civil society groups, this paper argues that even though new communication channels managed by activists tended to facilitate activist-created content addressed to the mainstream news media on the protest ­– which in itself challenges the media ecology of this region – the new communicational circumstances also nurtured conventional event-focused journalism, normalizing potentially disrupting forces.