Divergente

In Portuguese, divergente means a person who diverges and follows a different direction. But the word also allows some wordplay with diversity and people (in Portuguese: gente).

"We're constantly looking for a diversity of topics and a diversity of people to cover, different than the ones we usually find on traditional media. That's how we diverge," co-founder and editor-in-chief Sofia da Palma Rodrigues says. The magazine originally aimed to produce stories about the Portuguese-speaking world. With time, Sofia da Palma Rodrigues and her colleague Diogo Cardoso realised that "there was no such thing as a unified Portuguese-speaking world" as she explains. So Divergente became an outlet for stories that the journalists care about and can't find elsewhere.

The outlet's stories portfolio includes an investigation on African children that come to Portugal to play football, which won several awards and stirred a conversation about youth exploitation in sports.

What distinguishes Divergente, according to Sofia da Palma Rodrigues, is its multimedia approach. "We don't do multimedia only to throw video and text together with pictures. We start with an in-depth investigation and then develop a multimedia concept carefully thought to present it; this involves many people and takes a lot of time."

Until recently, Divergente was mainly funded by reporting grants. Its editor-in-chief says that although these are necessary and welcomed, some “structural fund for journalism” are also helpful. That is why since 2021 the outlet is primarily financed by Civitates, a European philanthropic initiative. Several foundations fund Civitates, including the Adessium Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the European Cultural Foundation and the Open Society Foundations.

Through its website, Divergente reaches 42,000 unique users a year. But its actual reach is more extensive since Divergente tends to partner with traditional media "to reach more heterogenous audiences than our niche audience," Sofia da Palma Rodrigues says.

In 2022, Divergente received the prestigious PRIX EUROPA for the best European Online Media Project.

Last updated: March 2024