Journalists, media organizations and freedom of expression advocates from El Salvador, Cuba, Argentina, Mexico and Ecuador were included on the long list of candidates for the Index on Censorship’s 2016 Freedom of Expression Awards announced on Dec. 16.
As 2015 comes to a close, the team at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas created a list of the Journalism in the Americas blog's most popular posts from the past year.
“The Mexican government doesn’t care about the journalists,” investigative journalist Anabel Hernández recently told the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
Six years after the 'chuzadas', or illegal wiretapping, of journalists in Colombia scandalized the country, their ghosts reappeared. In recent weeks, information about alleged corruption and abuse within the National Police has been revealed, including the monitoring and unlawful interception of journalists’ communications.
Police are investigating the murder of radio host Luiz Manoel Souza, 48, who was killed on Dec. 7 in a rural area of Ubá after being shot by a group of men. The group, at least some of them driving in a truck, first confronted him as he was in his car. The men shot at his car and tires, forcing Souza to flee to a wooded area, which is when he was shot.
The protagonists during Venezuela's Dec. 6 parliamentary elections were new digital platforms and social networks that became the principal vehicles through which media, nonprofit organizations and citizens received and provided information.
Despite low percentages of women in news reporting and presenting, Latin America has seen the most significant progress for gender equality in that field compared to other countries, according to a study of representation of women in the media around the world.
The decision of the National Assembly of Ecuador to adopt amendments to the constitution on Dec. 3 caused alarm for freedom of expression organizations in that country.
Covering parliamentary elections occuring on Dec. 6 in Venezuela has become a major challenge for national and international journalists.
This year, the most prestigious award of the Brazilian press, ExxonMobil Award of Journalism (formerly known as Esso Award, or Prêmio Esso), went to a story that used a public online database as its main source. On the night of Nov. 12, two members of the Estadão Dados team, José Roberto de Toledo and Rodrigo Burgarelli, along with reporter Paulo Saldaña, won the award in the main category for “Farra no Fiés” (Farra in Fiés).
“Since the government of Felipe Calderón declared ‘war’ against organized crime, the Mexican media have covered disappearances and deaths, but we forgot to narrate the day after.” So explains the introduction of the new Mexican digital portal Learning to Live with the Narco, or drug trafficker.
A number of Mexican journalists, newspapers and media outlets recently sent a formal declaration to the government of Veracruz denouncing alleged police violence against journalists while they were covering teacher protests on Nov. 21 and 22.