Congrats, Laura and Best Wishes, Eli! Change in Latin America Team Leadership

Laura Vidal (L) at the 2015 Global Voices Summit in Cebu, Philippines and Elizabeth Rivera (R) at the 2017 Global Voices Summit in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photos by Jer Clarke. CC-BY-NC.

Laura Vidal, who recently celebrated her 10-year anniversary with Global Voices, is now our sole editor for Latin America and Spanish language countries. Her co-editor Elizabeth Rivera stepped down last month to take up a job as Communications Director at IFEX, a partner organization we admire and support.

Congrats, Laura and we are rooting for you, Elizabeth!

We are thrilled to see the directions Laura's thoughtful leadership will take GV's Latin America and Spanish language communities and we are grateful for all the passion, energy, insight and kindness Elizabeth brought to the newsroom as an editor the last two years.

Laura joined our Latin America leadership team as a community manager in 2014, then got promoted to co-editor in 2015. She's been a co-editor for the region with Elizabeth Rivera since 2016.

Elizabeth's trajectory at Global Voices has been awe-inspiring: from joining us as a translator after being inspired by our stellar Arab Spring coverage in 2011, she went on to write hundreds of important stories from the region, and finally took the big jump two years ago, from a completely different career path, and joined us as Latin America editor. She has been teaching us a few of your marketing tricks along the way. Eli, you’ve taken curiosity and bravery, which we value so much at GV, to the next level.

Along with Laura, Elizabeth played a crucial role in nurturing GV’s biggest sub-community. And her on-your-toes approach to covering important stories from the region set a blazing example for the rest of the newsroom team. Under Eli and Laura's watch, Latin America consistently produced the highest volume of stories from a region! Elizabeth's work along with Laura in producing our special coverage on Venezuela and Mexican press freedom will always stand out to us and we are so grateful Eli stays on as our Twitter editor, along with Asteris Masouras.

Laura, first of all, happy 10 year anniversary with GV! A party is in order. Laura, you are always empathetic in your approach to covering underreported stories from the region and meeting some of the challenges that our decentralized and virtual set-up can kick up. We often go back to reading this wonderful conversation of editing between you and Lova, our Francophone editor.

We are so fortunate to have someone with Laura's compassion and unique perspective in a leadership position in the newsroom. Laura's made an impressive and well-deserved transition from translator and author writing humanizing stories; to our first community manager, where she trail-blazed and started virtual mini-Summits; to co-editor with Mary Aviles, then Elizabeth Rivera; and now editor for the whole region!

We are confident that Laura will continue to foster a healthier and more inspired community in meaningful ways, while producing important stories that supports our mission, helping achieve our not-so-humble goal of making more of the world look more like GV!

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