In the midst of a tense social climate and reports of attacks on the press, social media users in Venezuela are spreading the hashtag #ExpresiónSinOpresión (#ExpressionWithoutOppression) to talk about the importance of freedom of expression in the country.
Government officials have called for an investigation into claims made by one of Latin America’s most serious newspapers that the state-owned Banco Nacional of Costa Rica (BNCR) used official advertising against it.
Venezuelan journalist Leocenis García, founder and editor of the now-defunct editorial group 6to Poder, has been in prison for a week after his house arrest was revoked on July 4 and he was transferred to the jail of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN for its acronym in Spanish).
Voters of 5,570 Brazilian municipalities will go to the polls this year to choose the future leaders and legislators of their cities. A journalism institute has just released an online manual to help the local journalist whose job it is to inform these citizens ahead of municipal elections.
Earlier this year, Brazilian journalist Ricardo Gandour traded the newsroom’s frenetic environment for a somewhat more serene atmosphere of the university. The executive side of Gandour, director of content for media company Grupo Estado, gave space to his academic side as he became a visiting scholar at Columbia Journalism School in New York City. After a six-month stint, the editor will return to Brazil next week where he intends to continue uniting theory and practice.
The news team of the Sunday newscast Panorama was criminally charged by the Peruvian Defense Minister Jakke Valakivi after publishing a official secret documents that allegedly show evidence of embezzlement of resources of the Army Intelligence Service. The journalists could face a sentence of up to 15 years in prison for the crime of treason.
Reinventing the language of journalistic audiovisual production for the web was the main theme of the massive open online course (MOOC) "News video production for the internet." It’s also what the fifteen students of the course who were selected to participate in a workshop on YouTube Space in São Paulo wanted to express in their projects.
The task in front of Ana María Ruelas, the new director of the Article 19 Mexico and Central America office, will not be simple. In what is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist, she leads a team that fights daily for basic freedoms for communicators: access to information, protection from bodily harm and guarantees to freely carry out their work.
In little more than 200 words, journalists from across Latin America are telling the stories of their neighbors in highly descriptive snapshots rarely seen in traditional news stories. This is the project called Somos Nosotros.
Update (July 1, 2016): The legal processes and hearings against the Brazilian newspaper Gazeta do Povo were temporarily suspended on June 30 by a judge of the Federal Supreme Court, Rosa Weber, according to O Estado de S. Paulo.
Salvador Olmos García, a 31-year-old community radio host, is dead after being run over by a police car in Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca on June 26.
Last week, Brazilian journalists released the campaign Journalists against Harassment in order to denounce cases of harassment against media professionals and to raise public awareness about the issue. The campaign was created after the firing of a reporter who had reported having suffered sexual harassment during an interview with a Brazilian musician.