Luz Mely Reyes is a Venezuelan journalist, writer, and analyst. She is known as the director and co-founder of the digital media franchiseEfecto Cocuyo. She has received multiple honors for her work.
Reyes started her career as a sports journalist for the paper Últimas Noticias, which she did not relate with much. Later, she worked for El Aragüeño, where she was assigned to politics, which she was fond of and became one of her main sources of interest. In one interview, she said that it was only in February 1992 that she was "baptized" as a journalist. That was when she covered the February 1992 coup attempt against Carlos Andrés Pérez. She confessed, "I didn't know that a coup was coming, I was too ." That was her first day on the job, insisting she had to leave the house to go to work; it marked her career. In 2002, she became the Political Editor of Últimas Noticias. She was promoted to be Head of the Investigation Group, a role she held for ten years. She led the election project "Tuvoto2012" across the Cadena Capriles for a year. After that, she became director of Diario 2001 in 2014. In 2015, with colleagues Laura Weffer and Josefina Ruggiero she created a new independent digital media body, Efecto Cocuyo, with the slogan "Journalism that illuminates". The idea for the website came after incidents where the founders had been persecuted for attempting journalistic freedom; Reyes herself was arraigned by the government for writing a piece about gasoline shortages in Venezuela.
Publications
Books and blog
Con la vagina bien puesta, 2006. About the relation of women to society and the importance of physical appearance.
Acts of Corruption in the 2007 Iran-Venezuela Project.
Recognition
In 2014 she received the Napolitan Victory Award for merit in Latin-American political journalism. She was included in the list of the 30 most influential female academics in Iberoamerica in 2017 by Esglobal. In 2018 the Committee to Protect Journalists awarded Reyes the International Press Freedom Award. In her acceptance speech she noted that there were many other journalists killed and imprisoned that year and mentioned the fact that in 25 years of political journalism she only had to start wearing protective clothing in 2017, though she had faced government intimidation and jail threats before. The 2018 TimePerson of the Year was "The Guardians"–journalists refusing to stand down despite being persecuted for reporting the truth. Though not one of the four primary recipients of the honor, Reyes was spotlighted in the full feature.
Personal life
Reyes has a husband, Denis, and a son, Ivan, who is a photojournalist.