About Ruido

Ruido

Ruido is a Córdoba-based Argentine investigative journalism project built as a national network of journalists working against what its founders called the information vacuum in the country's provinces. Formally known as Red Ruido, it brings together journalists, communicators, open-data specialists and civil-society referents across Argentina to produce investigations based on public data about transparency, access to information, corruption and abuses of power. It operates online only as a non-profit digital newsroom, and in January 2025 it became a member of Chequeado's Federal Network of Innovative Journalism. Its story is unusual among Argentine digital outlets because its local base in Córdoba matters less than its method: a horizontal network designed to do, in twenty-four provinces at once, the kind of accountability reporting that many provincial media can no longer do alone.

The problem Ruido was created to address is documented and structural. In much of Argentina's interior, few independent media remain in a province, and many of those depend heavily on official advertising from provincial and municipal governments. Its founders told LatAm Journalism Review that they knew of provincial outlets for which government advertising represented up to seventy percent of income. That dependence, they argued, translated into pressure from local authorities, self-censorship, and the practical impossibility of investigating the very governments that paid for the advertising. Ruido's answer was to move the investigation outside any single provincial market: a network, funded and organised nationally, whose reporters in each province could contribute local knowledge to investigations no provincial government could quietly suppress by withdrawing an advertising contract.

Founding during the pandemic

Ruido took shape during the COVID-19 pandemic. About three years before February 2024, a group of Argentine journalists from different media noticed the contrast between Buenos Aires, where a wide variety of traditional and independent outlets could practise journalism in relative safety, and the provinces, where investigative reporting on corruption and abuse of power was far more difficult. The group that created the collaborative outlet was led by Edgardo Litvinoff, then an editor at the Córdoba newspaper La Voz del Interior, and Sergio Carreras, an author and political columnist. Both were based in Córdoba, which is why the project is catalogued as Córdoba-based even though its reporting territory is the whole country.

The founders decided on a horizontal structure. Journalists would work as a network rather than as a conventional hierarchy of editors and correspondents, producing investigative reports based on public data. That choice reflected both principle and necessity. A network could recruit experienced journalists who remained in their own provinces and media environments; a horizontal structure could make decisions collectively; and a shared investigation, published across the network, would be harder for any one provincial power to ignore or punish than a story carried by a single small outlet dependent on that province's advertising.

The first investigation: pandemic procurement

Ruido presented itself publicly with an investigation into public procurement during the pandemic, examining how Argentine provinces bought goods in 2020, the year of direct contracting and limited transparency. The study, supported by the foundation Fundeps in alliance with FOPEA, the Argentine Journalism Forum, and with the collaboration of Poder Ciudadano, used surveys of public portals and requests for access to information to examine purchases in thirteen Argentine provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires between March and December 2020. It asked three basic questions of each purchase: what was bought, how was it bought, and how much was paid.

The findings showed why comparable provincial data matters. According to the investigation, ninety-two percent of purchases made under the health emergency were made directly, without competitive procedures. The province of Buenos Aires bought ambulances at prices much higher than other districts; Chaco paid for the most expensive N95 mask identified in the country; and Córdoba and Buenos Aires concentrated the highest billing in a single supplier. None of those findings could have been produced by reporting in one province alone, because each depended on comparison: a price is only suspiciously high when the researcher knows what other provinces paid for the same thing at the same time. That comparative, data-based method became Ruido's signature.

A network across Argentina's provinces

At its presentation, the Red Ruido was described as a national network made up of journalists, communicators, open-data specialists and referents of civil organisations from fifteen provinces, aiming to make visible content from across the country on transparency, access to public information and corruption, and to produce investigations and reports on those subjects. By the time of LatAm Journalism Review's February 2024 profile, the Ruido team included journalists in each of Argentina's twenty-four provinces, as well as open-data specialists. The growth from a founding group to a presence in every province is central to the project: environmental, health, procurement and public-spending questions can then be examined in every jurisdiction under the same method, rather than only where a strong local newspaper happens to survive.

The inclusion of open-data specialists alongside reporters distinguishes Ruido from a traditional correspondents' network. Its investigations begin from datasets, public portals, budgets, procurement records and responses — or refusals — to access-to-information requests. Journalists in the provinces interpret what the data means locally: whether a contractor is politically connected, whether a purchased service was actually delivered, whether an official explanation matches what residents experienced. The combination addresses a common weakness of data journalism done from a capital city, where analysts may find a pattern in numbers but miss the local fact that explains or contradicts it.

News deserts and official advertising

Ruido's founders used the phrase news desert to describe most Argentine provinces. Litvinoff told LatAm Journalism Review that there was a great news desert in most provinces because there are very few media outlets, and those that exist had become excessively dependent on official advertising. The consequences he described were concrete: problems doing investigative journalism on transparency, access to information and corruption even inside established media, pressure from local authorities on media and journalists, and self-censorship by outlets that could not afford to lose government advertising.

This diagnosis is the context in which Ruido's Córdoba base should be read. Córdoba is one of Argentina's largest provincial media markets, with major legacy outlets and a strong journalism tradition, and even there a senior editor concluded that accountability reporting needed a new structure outside the provincial advertising market. If that was true in Córdoba, the founders reasoned, it was more acute in smaller provinces where a single government may be simultaneously the largest advertiser, the largest employer and the subject of the investigation. Ruido's network model, its non-profit form and its alliances with national and international journalism and transparency organisations are all responses to that specific economic problem, not simply a preference for digital publishing.

Method: requests, data and collaboration

Access-to-information requests are a basic tool of Ruido's work. Where data is not published, the network asks for it formally; where provinces respond differently to the same request, that difference itself becomes evidence about transparency in Argentina's federal system. The pandemic procurement investigation was built in exactly that way, combining what public portals disclosed with what had to be extracted through requests across fourteen jurisdictions. Subsequent network reporting follows the same logic of comparable questions asked everywhere at once.

Collaboration is also built into publication. A Ruido investigation is not the property of a single newsroom; it is produced by a network and can be taken up, localised and republished by media in the provinces concerned. That multiplies the audience for findings that might otherwise appear once, on a small site, and disappear. It also protects the work: an investigation present in many outlets across the country is a public record in a way a single provincial article is not. For local journalists, participation in the network provides something else of value — colleagues in other provinces working on the same dataset, editorial support for sensitive stories, and the professional solidarity that isolated provincial reporters often lack.

Member of Chequeado's Federal Network

In January 2025, Chequeado launched its Federal Network of Innovative Journalism, with support from the International Fund for Public Interest Media, to strengthen local journalism through collaboration with media in geographically isolated areas and areas where media presence is limited. Ruido, listed in the network as the Córdoba partner, joined Corrientes al Día, ADNSUR of Chubut, Aire Digital of Santa Fe and Todo Jujuy as one of the five local publishers in the collaboration. Together, the network's members were reported to reach an audience of more than six million people a month.

Membership connects Ruido's investigative network to Chequeado's distinct expertise in fact-checking public discourse, combating disinformation and media literacy. The federal network's stated priorities include verifying public discourse, creating content for younger audiences and conducting in-depth investigative reporting. For Ruido, described in its own directory entry for this rollout as an investigative and anti-disinformation project covering provincial public affairs, environment and accountability reporting, the fit is natural: the same provincial information vacuum that allows corruption to go unexamined also allows false claims to circulate unchallenged, because there is no well-resourced local institution whose job is to check either. Networks that share verification methods, investigative findings and training across provinces are one of the few realistic ways to rebuild that capacity outside Buenos Aires.

Environment and provincial public affairs

Ruido's coverage extends beyond procurement to provincial public affairs generally, including the environment. Environmental decisions in Argentina are largely provincial: mining, water, land use, waste, and the environmental assessment of large projects are governed and enforced by provincial authorities, and their effects are felt first by local communities. They are therefore exactly the kind of subject that suffers when provincial media cannot investigate provincial government. A network reporter in the affected province can document local conditions, while colleagues and data specialists compare how other provinces regulated or reported the same kind of activity.

The same applies to health systems, education spending, policing and public works — services delivered by provinces, funded by provincial budgets, and experienced by citizens as the daily reality of the state. National political journalism, concentrated on the presidency and Congress, can miss the cumulative story of how those services are actually administered across twenty-four jurisdictions. Ruido's premise is that a federation needs federal journalism: reporting structured like the country itself, with comparable scrutiny applied to every province rather than intense scrutiny in the capital and sporadic attention elsewhere.

Place in Argentine investigative journalism

Ruido occupies a distinctive place in Argentine media because it is neither a general newspaper nor a single-issue non-governmental organisation. It is a journalists' network that publishes investigations, organised horizontally, staffed across all twenty-four provinces, allied with established institutions such as FOPEA and Poder Ciudadano, supported at its presentation by Fundeps, and later incorporated into Chequeado's federal collaboration. Each of those relationships adds a layer of professional standing to work produced by provincial reporters who might otherwise publish alone.

Its significance is also diagnostic. Ruido exists because its founders judged that the normal economics of provincial media — dependence on official advertising, small markets, pressure from local government — had made a whole category of journalism unreliable in much of Argentina. Rather than lament that condition or compete within it, they built an institution designed around it. Whether such networks can be sustained financially over the long term is an open question for all non-profit investigative media in Latin America, and Ruido shares the sector's dependence on grants, alliances and reader and institutional support. But as a model — horizontal, data-based, federal in structure, and aimed directly at the provinces' information vacuum — it is one of the most clearly articulated responses Argentine journalism has produced to the news-desert problem, and its investigations, beginning with pandemic procurement, show what becomes visible when the same question is asked, with the same rigour, in every province at once.