The first website lasted a year. It was functional, in the way that windowless offices are functional. They serve their purpose, no one complains too much, and you learn not to think about what might be otherwise. I built it quickly, with what was available, because there was content to publish and no time for anything else. That is how almost everything that ends up mattering begins.
A year later, AcidReport launches a new website. This is not an aesthetic indulgence. It is a decision that concerns what we are and what I want to continue being. The medium is not neutral. The way information is presented says something about whoever presents it. A slow website, difficult to read on a mobile device, with an architecture that nobody fully understood, was not a minor technical problem. It was a contradiction.
I spent that first year learning. Learning what kind of journalism I want to practise, which stories merit the effort, which sources are reliable and which lie with elegance. Learning also which readers read me, how they arrived here, what they are looking for when they open an AcidReport article at eleven at night on their phone. That learning has consequences. This website is one of them.
Investigative journalism has a presentation problem. Not in the public relations sense, but in the literal sense. The way work is presented determines whether that work reaches those it is meant to reach.
Colombia has media. It has courageous journalists, some of the best on the continent, people who work with scarce resources and real risks. What is scarce is not talent or courage. What is sometimes scarce is the infrastructure that allows that work to circulate, to be found, to be read by someone who is not already a convert. An article that cannot be read properly on a mid-range Android phone does not reach the majority. That majority is the one that most needs the information.
The new AcidReport website is faster. It loads in less time, even on slow connections. It is more legible. Texts have the space they need, photographs do not compete with headlines, data is presented in a way that can be followed. Navigation is more logical. Investigations are easier to find. These are improvements that seem minor until one remembers how long things went on without them.
The first server received a wave of DDoS attacks throughout the year. Coordinated, sustained attacks, of the kind that do not happen by accident. Someone invested time and resources in trying to take AcidReport offline. They did not succeed. But they left a clear lesson about the difference between a provisional server and infrastructure built to last. The new website is hosted under conditions that take that lesson seriously.
When someone wants to silence you through technical force, it is because they have no arguments. It is also, in a certain sense, a confirmation that the work is worthwhile.
I took a break to build this website. A week without publishing, which in the current media ecosystem amounts to a small eternity. During that time, the world kept producing news at a pace that nobody can fully sustain. There were things I did not cover. Others will cover them, or nobody will, or I will arrive too late. That is also part of journalism. Choosing, and accepting what is lost with each choice.
AcidReport is not a real-time news outlet. It is an investigative outlet. The difference is not one of speed. It is one of method.
The method, in essence, is this. Find what is not on the surface, verify it with patience, write it with precision, publish it when it is ready and not before. That method does not change with the new website. What changes is the environment in which that method produces its results. A cleaner environment, more honest in its presentation, more coherent with what I am trying to do.
I have spent ten years watching Colombia from the outside and the inside at the same time. From the outside, because I do not operate from Bogotá or from Medellín, because my geographical distance gives me a perspective that those at the centre of the noise do not always have. From the inside, because the stories I tell are stories of real people, of concrete institutions, of money that moves along paths that someone decided should not be visible.
In that time I published investigations that made people uncomfortable who were not accustomed to being made uncomfortable. I received pressure, some explicit and some of the kind that prefers to leave no trace. I kept publishing. Not because I am a hero, which I am not, but because the alternative is to go quiet, to soften, to let things pass. That is not an alternative I can take seriously.
Power in Colombia, as everywhere else, functions best in the dark. It does not need conspiracies or movie villains. Inertia is enough for it, along with the tacit complicity of those who prefer not to know, and the exhaustion of those who know and no longer have the energy to be outraged. AcidReport exists to make that functioning more difficult. A little. What can be done.
I have no advertising. I have no institutional funding. I have readers, and I have judgement. So far, that has been enough.
This second year begins with more tools, more experience and, if I am honest, a sharper awareness of what I still do not know. The website you are looking at is the result of that awareness applied to something concrete. The investigations to come will be the result of that same awareness applied to what matters.
Colombia and the world are not short of things to investigate. That, at least, is not going to change.
We continue.
GS
Gabriel Schwarb
Director, AcidReport
Actualizado el 19 de April de 2026
