Journalists in Argentina are calling for a law that grants them true access to public information and ensures that state agencies comply with information requests, said Juan Carlos Simo, a member of the Argentine Journalist’s Forum (FOPEA)
Chilean journalist Claudia Urquieta from the online newspaper El Mostrador highlighted the importance of Chile’s transparency law as an investigative tool during the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas’ 11th Austin Forum
The biggest obstacles to transparency in Latin America and the Caribbean are the region’s enduring culture of secrecy, the infrequent use of right-to-information laws and the lack of training on how to use them effectively
For Bolivian investigative journalist Raúl Peñaranda, a columnist and former director of the independent newspaper Página Siete, access to information in his country is extremely limited.
After decades of a culture of virtually impenetrable secrecy within the Mexican government, in 2002 Mexico passed the Federal Access to Information and Personal Data Protection Act. Since then, it has become an often-cited model of how other governments should draft their own transparency laws.
It’s been almost 40 years since Tom Blanton filed his first public information request. Since then, Blanton, the current director of the nonprofit National Security Archive, has become a leading authority in access to information and been directly involved in the release of tens of thousands of documents declassified by the U.S. government.
Mariano Blejman is a recipient of the Knight International Fellowship, and as part of his work to promote media innovation in the region, he recently created Media Factory, the first accelerator for news organizations in the world.
Journalist Simone Ronzani created Recontando, a website that adapts the biggest stories from social media sites into educational cartoons for kids.
On World Press Freedom Day, several press freedom organizations underscored the preoccupying increase in attacks against media outlets and journalists around the world that made 2012 the deadliest year for journalists in the last decade.
Last month Donna DeCesare, an award-winning photojournalist and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, released her bilingual book Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs.
Violence continues in Mexico but the new administration of president Enrique Peña Nieto is making an all-too-obvious push to disassociate the country’s image from drugs, cartels and bloodshed, according to three leading U.S. correspondents based in Mexico during an April 4 panel hosted by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
After a two-week hiatus following a massive cyber-attack, the websites of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and the International Symposium for Online Journalism are now back online.