Nearly 1,000 Mexican judges, lawyers and other operators of justice participated in an online course on issues of freedom of expression and journalist safety offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas in association with UNESCO and in close cooperation with the UNESCO Office in Mexico.
After more than a century in the hands of the Mantilla family, one of Ecuador's oldest and most traditional newspapers – El Comercio – has been sold to Latin American media mogul Remigio Ángel González, a Mexican who launched his TV empire in Guatemala and is known for avoiding editorial conflict with governments.
Honduras has defied the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and decided to uphold an order to ban journalist Julio Ernesto Alvarado from work for 16 months.
The newly launched Sin Etiquetas, or “No Labels,” is a website dedicated to promoting homophobia-free journalism across Latin America.
The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) has announced the launch of an annual series of prizes for investigative journalism in Argentina amidst what the organization has described as an “unbearable climate of threats, persecutions, and poor working conditions weighing on the profession.”
Impunity in the murder of journalists is not new in Latin America. In the last decade, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported 72 instances of journalists killed for their work. About 78 percent of these cases faced complete or partial impunity. But in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, levels of impunity have surpassed those of any other Latin American country, according to CPJ’s 2014 Global Impunity Index.
An upcoming vote that could alter the laws governing mass media in Ecuador has stoked fears in the Andean nation that the end of a free press in near.
In a hearing before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), a group of Venezuelan journalists, union members, and local NGOs have firmly denounced ongoing censorship of the press in Venezuela.
The ability to cope with a disruptive environment and an awareness of new technological resources are key skills for the 21st century journalist. This was the lesson highlighted by a group of eight students who participated in a recent Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. The students won scholarships to attend the 10th Brazilian Congress of Newspapers (CBJ by its initials in Portuguese) and visit the facilities of Google Brasil.
As part of its series of occasional e-books, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas just launched “Transparency and Accountability: Journalism and access to public information in Latin America and the Caribbean.”