Reporteros populares (people's reporters) have emerged in a number of Latin Amer ican countries as a fruitful means of incorporating grass-roots participation into media devel opment practices. Scholars have documented and described a number of people's reporters projects, yet few have explained how participation is constructed and enacted in any theoret ically systematic way. This article reviews the limited work on people's reporters from Latin America, proposes a theoretical template for systematically analyzing participatory practice, and applies the template to data collected in the Bolivian highlands in 1993. Data for this study were collected using ethnographic field methods over a five-week period at Radio Pío XII in Bolivia. Recommendations are included for development practitioners interested in incorporating participatory aspects into their media projects.
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