The economic good fortunes of Brazil, as increased newspaper circulation and online advertising revenue show, seem to have caught the attention of foreign media companies. Last Sunday, the New York Times announced its plans to launch a Portuguese site in Brazil during the second half of 2013.
In a press release, the New York Times Company said it aims to attract readers in Brazil that are “educated, affluent and connected with the rest of the world.” It will publish between 30 and 40 stories a day, with a third of them being original content produced by local journalists. The rest will be translated articles from the newspaper’s print edition.
Even though news outlets in Brazil are increasingly willing to charge readers for access to online content, the general manager and chief advertising officer of NYTimes.com promised, in an interview with the Financial Times, that their Brazilian website will not have the pay wall model used by their U.S. version and will depend on advertising revenue.
Explaining the company’s move, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in the press release that “Brazil is an international hub for business that boasts a robust economy, which has brought more and more people into the middle class… (it) is a perfect place for The New York Times to take the next step in expanding our global reach.”
A few weeks prior to the New York Times’ announcement, the British daily Financial Times began distributing its own U.S. edition in Brazil. It’s the first time the publication is produced and printed in Latin America. In addition to its print edition, the newspaper launched a smartphone app and opened a section dedicated to Latin America on its website, Exame reported.
According to the Financial Times, traffic from Latin American users to their website is steadily growing and the number of Brazilian online subscribers has increased at a rhythm of 40 percent a year.
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.
