The workshop that was organized by the UNESCO Offices in Montevideo, Havana and Port au Prince took place in the historic Villa of Victoria Ocampo, today a culture reference centre in Mercosur administrated by UNESCO. The meeting gathered 35 heritage experts and cultural journalists from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Designed as a platform for journalistic capacity building and knowledge exchange, the workshop provided the possibility for participants to address a wider concept of heritage, including cultural and natural, tangible and intangible, documentary and digital heritage. Analyzing the situation in the seven countries involved, journalists and experts discussed ways to increase and improve media coverage of heritage.

In order to raise the awareness on the challenges of heritage preservation for sustainable development, the participants presented national and international initiatives on this matter, including digital preservation.

The participants stressed the need to reinforce partnerships between heritage specialists and media professionals based on ethics and mutual responsibility. They also agreed to jointly prepare a guidebook on Media coverage and heritage. This new and interdisciplinary tool will include UNESCO’s international normative instruments for protection of heritage, information on flagship initiatives like UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme and the Slave Route Project and practical didactic exercises.

In the course of the workshop, the participants also visited the headquarters of important Argentina’s daily newspapers and TV stations to discuss ways to improve coverage of heritage.