“Silence or Death in Mexico's Press” is the title of the just-released 2010 report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The report is an accounting of the crisis in freedom of expression and access to information resulting from surging organized crime, violence and corruption.
Brazil's first online presidential debate, provided by Folha de S. Paulo and the website UOL and still available online, attracted more than 1.7 million views during its first day up on the Internet, reported M&M Online. The debate took place Wednesday, Aug. 18.
During the wave of violence in Kenya in 2008, that stemmed from conflicts among rival political factions, a group of friends created a system in which persons in various locations could send and share, via the Internet, news about attacks and killings. The Ushahidi (witness in Swahili) online platform became a model of success for participative coverage of news worldwide. Now the system has come to Brazil, with Voter 2010, an unprecedented election monitoring tool for citizens.
Even as violence and kidnappings are pressuring mainstream Mexican media into silence, an anonymous blog that is less than six-months-old has become one of the main sources for news about the country's out-of-control drug war, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Almost two years after the enactment of the Law on Access to Public Information (Law 18.381) in Uruguay, the administration has published a decree regulating its use. To incite journalists from throughout the country to take advantage of the law, the Archives and Access to Public Information Center launched this week a campaign, “Make Your Own Request.”
Trying to find information about a journalism program at a university in Guatemala or a journalism professor in Brazil? A new online database from the World Journalism Education Council and the Knight Foundation will help you do just that.
Javier Canales and Alejandro Hernández, two of the four journalists kidnapped by drug gangs in Durango state, were freed in a rescue operation Saturday, AFP reports. Cameraman Héctor Gordoa was freed Thursday and La Cronica de Hoy reports that the journalist Óscar Solís had been released last Tuesday.
Venezuela's Supreme Court emphasized one more time that freedom of expression is not an absolute right, and established various limitations to access to governmental information, reported El Tiempo.
A group comprised of universities, media, and civil and press organizations that is promoting the Law of Transparency and Access to Public Information urged the Salvadoran legislature to approve in the short term "an effective law in accordance with international principles and best practices," reported El Mundo and El País.
The attorney general's office has asked the National Archive to uncomplicate the public’s access to documents from the military dictatorship (1964-85) and to abandon a series of bureaucratic demands, Folha de S. Paulo reports. (Read the Defender’s recommendation, in Portuguese, in PDF.)
For three days in a row, Puerto Rico's Senate President, Thomas Rivera Schatz, prohibited the press from entering the Senate floor, reported El Nuevo Día. This was an unprecedented event in the Senate's history.
Christopher Coke, an alleged drug kingpin central to recent violence and unrest in Kingston, was arrested and extradited to the U.S. last week, but Jamaican media outlets were blocked from covering the arrest and were forced to rely on images taken by foreign photographers, the Jamaica Observer reports.