Prodavinci

In 2009, Angel Alayón, a Venezuelan economist out of the University of Chicago, created a personal blog and decided it needed more content, stating "I would read things in the New Yorker, or the Atlantic, or Slate, and I would wonder why Venezuela couldn’t have something like that".[1] Soon after, friends and the intellectual elite in Caracas began to show desire on posting on his blog, with Alayón then naming his blog "Prodavinci" as a "reference to DaVinci" and as "a call for a 'renaissance' of ideas in the country".[1] Alayón describes Prodavinci as "a space for ideas, discussions and debates"[4] though he doesn't want the website to be "a regular opinion page", saying:

"I always tell my writers that ‘opinion sucks,’ and what I mean is that in Venezuela, what passes as ‘opinion’ is not solid because it is not well-grounded. People can have an opinion, but they need to argue their points, not just state them".[1]

Venezuelan journalist and author Boris Muñoz was one of the first to join Prodavinci while Willy McKey is the assistant editor.[1] Contributors have included fiction writer and essayist Federico Vegas as well as constitutional lawyer José Ignacio Hernández.[1]

According to media protection organizations, Venezuelans "have been forced to find alternatives as newspapers and broadcasters struggle with state efforts to control coverage", with a growing trend of Venezuelans using online news media to bypass government censors.[3] When Prodavinci was launched in 2009, only dozens of visitors viewed the website.[3] By 2014, Prodavinci saw greater than double the monthly viewers with 239,000 visitors in September 2014.[3] In June 2015, the website was then receiving "several million hits per month".[1]

• Efecto Cocuyo
• La Patilla
• El Pitazo

• Prodavinci on Facebook
• Prodavinci on Twitter