Advances on the digital revolution, attacks on journalists, and state-media conflict have marked journalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to UNESCO's 2014 report “World Trends in Freedom of Expression and Media Development”. The document highlights state harassment of journalists, challenges reforming outdated media laws, media concentration, lack of journalistic resources and training, and drug-related journalistic deaths as some of the major problems facing journalists in the region.
Private news enterprises have weathered a long history of crippling attacks from the Venezuelan government. Some media owners are now giving up and selling their properties.
Three Mexican journalists in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz and Guanajuato have been killed in the span of a week.
After 32 years of print publication, the Ecuadorian daily newspaper Hoy announced that it will stop printing, buckling under government policy which many allege intends to cripple independent press. Hoy, known as an opposition publication, will continue with digital publication.
A Paraguayan radio host was shot and killed in his home on June 19, just over one month after another radio reporter was killed on the same region, near the border with Brazil. Édgar Fernández Fleitas was a known critic of the local justice system and could have been killed in retribution for criticisms he made of local officials, according to newspaper ABC Color.
In the middle of the June 2013 protests that brought thousands of people to the Brazilian streets, the carioca newspaper Extra took advantage of the popular mobilization to start a pioneering project in the country: The use of a message app, WhatsApp in news coverage. Quick, simple, and direct, the readers started sending texts photos and videos directly to the publication. In an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas the editor Fábio Gusmão, the founder of the project, strikes a balance
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) called on the Inter American Court of Human Rights to sentence the Venezuelan government for having unlawfully shut down TV network RCTV in 2007.
To create more awareness and knowledge in Brazil about the country's young Public Information Law -- which was approved two years ago on May 16, 2012 -- the Brazilian Investigative Journalism Association (Abraji) published this week on its site the guide in Portuguese “Public Information Law -- What you need to know,” with the financial support of UNESCO's International Program for the Development of Communication.
Investigative journalist Mark Bassant was forced to leave Trinidad and Tobago last week after receiving death threats, the International Press Institute (IPI) informed.
The government of Bolivian city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra canceled the ads that usually run in local newspaper El Deber after the latter published in its website a video that shows the city's mayor Percy Fernández Áñez touching the leg of a journalist sitting next to him, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) said last week.
Forty-six percent of Guatemala's government institutions bound under the country's Access to Public Information Law (LAIP in Spanish) did not present their annual reports on how they responded to public information requests received during 2013, news website Plaza Pública reported.
Award-winning Colombian journalist María Teresa Ronderos will be the new director of Open Society Foundations' Program on Independent Journalism. Each year, the program channels millions of dollars to support independent journalism projects around the world.