In a July 12 ceremony in Washington, D.C., Brazil and the United States outlined a new multilateral initiative, the "Open Government Partnership" (OGP), which aims to find ways to combat corruption and promote transparency, according to a U.S. State Department statement and the newspaper O Globo.
The Associated Press (AP) severed ties with a freelance photographer after he manipulated a photo of children playing soccer near the town of Mendoza, Argentina, in order to eliminate his shadow from the image, according to a July 11 memo from AP director of photography Santiago Lyon, reported Poynter.org.
Paola Carvalho decided to take several hours away from her daily work in the newsroom at Diários Associados to participate in the online course “Journalism 2.0," offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. The result of this “break” to study was a report that won a Sebrae Journalism Prize, one of Brazil's most prestigious awards for economic reporting.
The National Association of Journalists (CNP in Spanish) in Venezuela accused state media of spreading "hate" messages and urged authorities to take action to curb this practice with the same speed they normally investigate and punish private media, alluding to the recent complaint filed against opposition television station Globovisión, reported El Universal.
A new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will help two Latin American journalists extend their Knight Latin American Nieman Fellowships so they can explore projects that may create new ways to keep citizens informed while also enhancing a free press.
Emilio Gutiérrez, a Mexican journalist seeking asylum in the United States after fleeing the drug-related violence in the northern region of the country, has petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) to investigate and rule on the inability of the Mexican government to protect the rights of journalists who have been threatened by the military since President Felipe Calderón began his anti-drug war in 2006, reported El Diario in El Paso, Texas.
An internal investigation of the São Paulo civil police has determined, three years after the case started, that the arrest of Brazilian reporter Roberto Cabrini was a result of a police set-up, according to Folha de S. Paulo. The journalist, host of the program Conexão Repórter on television station SBT, was held for two days, accused of transporting 10 bags of cocaine in his car in April 2008.
The slaying of Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral after a June 9 concert in Guatemala put the country in the international spotlight. Authorities have reported increasing levels of violence in Guatemala, where the murder rate is more than double that in Mexico, where fights between rival drug trafficking gangs and security forces have left more than 35,000 dead since 2006.
Peruvian journalist Hans Francisco Andrade Chávez, ex-host of a news program on the local affiliate channel of América TV in Chepén, in northern Perú, was sentenced to two years in prison for defamation, according to the Press and Society Institute (IPYS in Spanish). Andrade is the most recent journalist in Peru to be convicted of libel. In April, journalist Paul Garay was sentenced to three years in jail for defamation of a prosecutor.
The average circulation for paid-for daily newspapers climbed by five percent in South America and fell by 11 percent in North America from 2005 to 2009, says the Economist magazine in a recent report that also connected the shifts in circulation to the rates of acceptance of social media.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) celebrated the arrest of five suspects accused of killing Brazilian journalist Edinaldo Filgueira, blogger and director of the local chapter of the Workers Party in the state of Rio Grande do Norte.
In his blog on the Luis Nassif website, Brazilian journalist Ricardo Gomez Filho claims he was fired from the São Paulo newspaper Folha Metropolitana on July 7 at the request of congressman Carlos Roberto de Campos of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB in Portuguese).