Prodavinci

Prodavinci
Type of site	News site
Available in	Spanish
Owner	Angel Alayón
URL	www.prodavinci.com
Registration	None
Users	+1.0 million
Launched	2009
Current status	Active

Prodavinci is a Venezuelan news site that provides analysis from historians, scholars and scientists.^[2] Foreign Policy called Prodavinci "a one-stop shop for Spanish-language analysis of the Venezuelan reality"^[1] while The Wall Street Journal described the website as having "serious political analysis".^[3]

History

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]

Reception

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]

On 2 March 2022 Prodavinci received the King of Spain International Journalism Award in the category of International Cooperation and Humanitarian Action for their investigation "La promesa rota: el colapso de la seguridad social" (Spanish: The broken promise: the collapse of the social security system).^[5]