Tell Me, David
Listen to queer stories — past and present. Produced by journalist David Hunt, a regular contributor to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.
Tell Me, David
The News Is Out: Queer Journalist Enrique Anarte
Over 5 billion people around the world use social media — and each of them spends, on average, about two-and-a-half hours a day texting, watching videos, gossiping, posting cat pictures and getting the latest news. But in an era of A.I. hallucinations and deepfakes, can you really trust what you hear and see online?
One queer journalist is taking up the challenge of building trust — and an audience — on TikTok and other social media platforms. David Hunt sat down to talk shop with reporter Enrique Anarte, a correspondent at Context, the Thomson Reuters Foundation's journalism platform.
Anarte is an experienced journalist with a master’s in European Union studies and proficiency in five languages. Much of his work for Thomson Reuters involves traditional reporting, which is abundantly sourced and rigorously documented. Less traditional is his presence on social media. Anarte has a large following on TikTok and Instagram, where he posts short, sometimes humorous videos on LGBTQ topics. It’s a new day, he says, and not everyone looks for news and information in traditional formats.
“Social [media] cannot be an afterthought,” he says. “If that happens, you are not serving people with the kind of formats or journalism that they need. We need to understand that social audiences are humans. As Walt Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes.’ When someone opens the newspaper in the morning and then opens TiKTok before bed, they might be seeking the same kind of information, but in slightly different ways.”
Produced for This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine.
David Hunt is an Emmy-winning journalist and documentary producer who has reported on America's culture wars since the 1970s. Explore his blog, Tell Me, David.
David Hunt:
The news media is changing. Primarily because people have changed where and how they look for news and information to make sense of the world. Daily newspapers and network news programs are on the decline, social media platforms continue to grow, in both audience and engagement. That’s created challenges. First and foremost, an alarming amount of disinformation competes for the internet’s eyes and ears.
But there are opportunities for truth-telling as well.
I’m David Hunt. Join me as I explore some of the challenges and choices confronting the news industry — and meet one reporter who’s harnessing the power of social media to tell the stories of LGBTQ people around the world. A new style of reporting at an organization whose very name is synonymous with traditional journalism.
In a YouTube video produced a few months ago, Enrique Anarte sits in the back seat of a van, surveying the desert landscape along a lonely stretch of highway leading to Walvis Bay. The city is home to Namibia’s only natural deep-water harbor and about 100,000 residents, many of whom work in the port and fishing industries.
Anarte is a correspondent at Context, The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s journalism platform and Openly, its LGBTQ news site. He traveled to the west coast of Africa to document the experiences of one of the area’s residents — a transgender woman named Ruann, a sex worker taunted when she sought care at a local hospital. In the video, Anarte picks up the story.
Anarte (from YouTube):
“At 18 she suffered an acid burn that led to her deciding she’d never return to a state hospital again. Ruann: The male nurse was like why are you acting like a girl while you know you are a boy? And it started to become like I’m on a comedy show because everybody’s now laughing while the nurse is busy attending to me. Anarte: Ruann told us the nurse pointed to her genitals while bathing her as proof of her real gender and then cut her hair under the auspices of treatment even though the burn was on her arm. Ruann: It was just a horrifying experience. And that’s why I decided I’m not going back to any state facility.”
David Hunt:
The reporting is personal and engaging, focusing on Ruann’s steely resolve and quiet dignity in the face of stigma and harassment. And presenting her experiences in the larger context of Africa’s efforts to meet the medical needs of LGBTQ people — especially those at risk for HIV — at a time when financial aid from the United States is on the chopping block.
The reporting is notable for other reasons. Anarte is based in Berlin, not Africa. He’s a gay reporter whose beat is LGBTQ news. His coverage area: the entire world. His tools are social media platforms: YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram among others.
I sat down with him, remotely of course, to discuss his career path, the new tools of an old trade — and the stories that have meant the most to him.
Enrique Anarte:
I am originally from the south of Spain, from Andalusia. But I have been living in Germany for eight years already. I work as a journalist. I've actually always worked as a journalist. And for the past few years I have had the privilege to specialize both in covering LGBTQ plus topics globally, but also to experiment with let's say new, a little bit more creative social first social video formats.
David Hunt:
In fact, Anarte is what Thomson Reuters calls its first “TikTok lead,” its first reporter to seriously and consistently engage with a generally younger, queer, digital-native audience on a platform that allows the journalist to build a following and put himself at the center of his coverage. In the past three years he’s reported on some of the most pressing issues facing the LGBTQ community, including far-right extremists targeting pride marches in Germany, efforts to ban queer online content in Indonesia, and the oppression of queer people in Russia.
How did Anarte become one of the most visible queer journalists on social media? It started — as a lot of things did — with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Enrique Anarte:
Until the pandemic, I was purely a text journalist. We were all locked down at home. And, you know, a lot of people were doing yoga. My boyfriend loves yoga and I hate yoga. Nothing against the people. But I do not enjoy it. My brother's girlfriend reached out to me and she was like, there's this new app, people are doing lip syncs, we can try it out together. And I was like, why not? Like, anything that's not yoga, I'll fully embrace it. And and so we started like doing like trending, using trending sounds to make funny videos on TikTok. And after a while she got bored of it. And I, but I started experimenting to make contents that was funny and was like totally like amateur, like normal person, let's say. Not professional at all. But that conveyed some sort of information or educational angle when it, when it came to two main topics, one of them European Union politics and LGBTQ plus rights, which was sort of like the thing I loved covering the most as a journalist. And that totally blew up. Like video started, video started to go viral. And mostly not just, it wasn't that much about virality. 'cause I think virality is a double-edged sword. But it was about the reaction from the community online and a kind of engagement and a relationship with the audience that I didn't have as someone writing articles. Right. So that is when after a few months doing that, I got a call to join the first TikTok team at DW Deutsche Wella. And then one year after I got a call from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which is my current employer, to co-launch a TikTok channel for Openly, our global LGBTQ plus news brand. And eventually I joined TRF full time. So yeah, that's kinda like how it all came, came together.
David Hunt:
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that Anarte’s career is just a hobby that went viral. He’s a seasoned journalist with more than a decade of experience covering Spanish politics, international affairs, and the arts, with a focus on human rights and gender issues. And he has a master’s degree in European Union studies and an undergraduate degree in international relations and foreign languages.
If his visibility — his personal brand — on TikTok brought him to the attention of the people at Thomson Reuters, his track record as a journalist and proficiency in five languages made him a smart hire.
Enrique Anarte:
It's very easy to say, build your brand, but A, not everyone has the time to do that and B, are all employers ready for their employees actually having a brand? Because having a brand means having a voice. And I think especially in the journalism industry, which has at least formally always been very conservative when it comes to formats, when it comes to how things should be done and have been done forever and ever. I think it can be tricky sometimes, and many employers I think are not ready and are only now catching up. It's, it's hard to like really separate the person from the brand at some point. And you know, I understand why some people might have concerns about that, but I think it is, it is a reality of journalism today, and it's either we embrace it or we, you know miss the train.
David Hunt:
You’re listening to This Way Out: The International LGBTQ Radio Magazine. I’m David Hunt, talking with journalist Enrique Anarte, a correspondent at Context, The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s journalism platform and Openly, its LGBTQ news site.
Perhaps now would be a good time to give a bit of background on Anarte’s employer. The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, one of the largest and oldest newsgathering organizations in the world. Reuters is no stranger to technological innovation. At its founding in 1851, the news service used carrier pigeons and an emerging technology — the telegraph — to deliver the latest news to subscribers in London and beyond.
The charitable foundation, established in 1983, offers a range of initiatives and services that defend media freedom, foster more inclusive economies and promote human rights. It’s the world’s largest provider of pro bono legal support for independent media and a source of independent news analysis on topics like climate change and LGBTQ rights.
And even though it’s embracing new tools for storytelling, it maintains rigorous editorial standards — something you can’t always count on in today chaotic media environment.
Enrique Anarte:
Everything is fact checked. There's always a, a, you know, we always reach out if a government is criticized you know, that position of that government is always there in a way or another. So we're not like giving up on our journalism standards, we're just like telling it in a new way. A big part of my journalism is totally traditional, and I also make funny TikToks that have the same editorial standards than the other formats.
David Hunt:
I asked Anarte what tough question he would ask himself, if he were conducting this interview.
Enrique Anarte:
What is our place in this new world where people are not just getting information from us, but from content creators, governments companies, NGOs, that now anyone can go to TikTok or Instagram or any other platform, so how do we like show people that journalism is valuable and and how do we define this like, role of our industry in, in this new world? Sorry to give you such an open answer. The world has changed, and it's not a generational change. It's, this is, this isn't about Gen Z, it's about everyone being able to post content online. So what are we giving people as journalists that other people are not?
David Hunt:
Finally, I wanted to know about the stories that meant the most to Anarte, not just as a reporter, but as a person, a queer person.
Enrique Anarte:
I think two of the stories that have marked me the most recently have been the, the two short documentaries that we published this year. One of them we filmed in Kenya, and it was about LGBTQ plus asylum seekers in, in Kenya. They live in a legal limbo and they live in, in conditions that I have been very lucky to never really see in my life at least so closely. And when I was there, it just it was just eye opening and obviously heartbreaking. But, but also just talk to them about their dreams and see the human ability to dream even in, in those, in those conditions. … Another story that really touched me was we went to Namibia and we filmed this short documentary about the impact of the current US administration's health cuts, global health cuts, on Namibia’s trans community. I actually didn't know until we started researching this story that for many trans people in Namibia, it is simply not possible to go to a state clinic or hospital because you are gonna be laughed at, you're gonna be discriminated against, you're gonna like, suffer even violence. In general, when any, you know, no matter which topic you're working on to me it all comes down to empathy and to like doing a kind of journalism that is empathetic to the people that are being covered that yes your, your, your journalistic values, which in our case at TRF, you know, the, the Reuters values of integrity, independence, freedom of bias. You should always keep those values. And at the same time, I want, I try to do a journalism that is empathetic towards the communities that are being covered.
David Hunt:
I’d like to thank Enrique Anarte for sharing his insights as a journalist covering the LGBTQ community worldwide. Find him at context.news. For This Way Out, I’m David Hunt.
