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]
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]
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]
