The Iberian American Digital Journalism Colloquium, which emerged over the years as an informal post-ISOJ (International Symposium of Online Journalism) conversation among journalists from Latin America, Spain and Portugal attending the symposium, convened an interesting group of innovative journalists for its eleventh edition. Those in attendance shared their experiences and projects at the School of Journalism at the Moody School of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin, on April 15.
When Martha Ortiz accepted the offer to completely overhaul El Colombiano, a century-old newspaper in Medellin, Colombia, she resolved to question everything the news industry believed. Then she did it with remarkable results.
Mass communication was one of the areas most affected by the expansion of technology. Technological changes have also put the traditional media business model in check. In this context, technologies such as algorithms, artificial intelligence and Natural Language Generation (NLG) have emerged, which are increasingly dominant in media companies that use them for a variety of applications from news production to content distribution.
Few journalists are better known among Bogotá youth than 27-year-old María Paulina Baena. Once a week she appears on camera, variably napping on her desk, waving her arms and always overflowing with furor as she bluntly calls out the faults of her country and its leaders.
Journalists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba and Venezuela, as well as Spain and Portugal, were recipients of the 2018 King of Spain International Journalism Awards.
It’s been a tumultuous few years of Brazilian news. A year after the World Cup frenzy and the presidential election that ended in an impeachment a few months later, newsrooms turned inward: Which would be the next to downsize? As company after company laid off employees, some journalists in São Paulo began to wonder just how many reporters and editors had become unemployed in the shrinking of the news industry in Brazil in the past couple of years.
From 2001 to 2017, fourteen media organizations were launched in Cuba that are already having impact on and off the island. Most of their teams have fewer than a dozen journalists, and many of them are volunteers. All these media sites have reporters working from Havana, but 50 percent have offices or newsrooms in foreign cities, such as Miami, Mexico City and Valencia, Spain.
Digital and social media activity continues to increase throughout the world, and Latin America is no exception.
What began as a simple interest has turned into a passion project for Verónica Sanchis Bencomo. Through her website Foto Féminas, the photographer publishes monthly features in Spanish and English that highlight the work of female photographers in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Now Sanchis has taken her work from the web to a library.
Cuban digital media site 14ymedio is betting on a new membership program for readers to ensure its independence and increase engagement.