By Dean Graber
Mexico’s growing drug violence is a leading topic of news around the world, making headlines this week, for example, not only in English and Spanish, but in Arabic, Japanese, Russian and Urdu.
The Mexican tabloid newspaper El Nuevo Alarma, which features graphic photos of the violence, gained attention this week in the U.S. media, in posts by The Daily Beast and CNN.com.
“Alarma! is Mexico’s most shameless tabloid, like the New York Post with one-100th of the editorial discretion,” The Daily Beast’s Bryan Curtis says. “Alarma! offers perhaps the most unflinching forensic view of Mexico’s drug war. It is one thing to read that some of the 20,000 Mexicans have been killed in the fighting since 2006. It is another thing to see them—these headless bodies in an endless war—up close.”
The weekly newspaper reports a circulation of 80,000, with at least one in four of those copies sold in the United States, mostly in southern California, Texas, and New York, Curtis says. Alarma! is sold at the newsstand inside Manhattan’s West Fourth Street subway station. “The paper is often placed at the back of the stacks, like Playboy and Penthouse. But one newsman told me the other day that he always sells out of Alarma!”
Two producers for VBS.TV of Brooklyn spent a week with Alarma!’s night photographers and made a video about their experiences, viewable at CNN.com.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
