Fernando Rodrigues, Brazil, started as a reporter in 1985 and has been a journalist ever since.
In 2016, Rodrigues launched the news portal Poder360, based in Brasília, Brazil’s capital. Rodrigues pioneered political journalism on the internet in Brazil and in 2000 started a political blog and website at UOL. In 2002, he launched Políticos do Brasil, a website and database with information about Brazilian politicians. In 2006, the website presented an updated version with some 25,000 records, encompassing virtually all Brazilian politicians.
Rodrigues has widely used database journalism techniques in Brazil in the past 15 years helping to encourage use of new media platforms to produce quality reporting. As a print media journalist, Rodrigues worked 27 years for Folha de S.Paulo, the country’s major newspaper, from 1987 to 2014. At Folha, he spent time as economics editor in São Paulo and as a foreign correspondent in New York, Tokyo and Washington, D.C. Based in Brasília, he has also worked as both a political columnist for the paper’s op-ed page and a features and investigative reporter. Additionally, Rodrigues worked from 2007 to 2017 as a primetime daily political commentator for Jovem Pan, a leading radio station with a national audience of some 25 million listeners.
Rodrigues has won several journalism awards in Brazil and abroad, including the web journalism prize from Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano headed by Gabriel García Márquez. One of his books, “Políticos do Brasil”, was awarded the best journalistic book in Brazil in 2006.
In 2002, Rodrigues joined a group of journalists responsible for putting together Abraji, the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism. Rodrigues served as Abraji’s president in 2010-11. He currently has a position on Abraji's board of trustees. One of his duties at Abraji is to coordinate the Brazilian campaign for the full implementation of the Brazilian Freedom of Information Act that Congress passed in 2011.
Rodrigues was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 2007-08.