Qi News

Qi News is a magazine focusing on social injustice, including racism, class, structural poverty, marginalisation, gentrification, and the abandonment of inland areas.

António Castelo, its founder, was aware that mainstream media wasn't paying attention to these topics. At the same time, he found that academia regularly studied and looked at some of these issues. However, he considered the academic language too difficult to understand. Both things led him to discover this gap in the media industry.

"Black people living in the outskirts of Lisbon or poor gay men living in marginalised areas of the city won't see themselves in the media or are unable to find references which make them feel seen, heard or understood," Castelo says.

Although Qi News works as a magazine publishing stories around these issues, it's through its YouTube channel that the audience usually encounters the outlet. Inspired by the web video stories produced by Vice News, Vox, the groundbreaking TV Channel 4's Unreported World, and some animated journalism, Castelo intended to make Qi News' YouTube channel the primary platform.

"A video with a yellow logo, moving pictures, people talking and things happening reaches more people. The language of web video is more open, even more so than TV, which has some stringent codes," António Castelo says.

Qi News is a reference to the measures of intelligence quotient or information quotient and is meant to be understood through the lens of what's possible because of democratization. Challenging the notion of a standard, fixed, immutable standard, Qi News claims that awareness about one’s situation and world affairs can be expanded and increased by making information available and accessible to everyone. That’s the team’s mission.