Grupo Globo, the largest media conglomerate in Brazil and Latin America, announced on Jan. 19 that it would unify the newsrooms of its newspapers Extra and O Globo. As part of the process, the outlets fired more than 30 journalists. According to the editorial director of O Globo, Ascânio Seleme, the measure aims to streamline costs and implement “radical” changes, which should turn the focus of the outlets to digital production.
Journalists from Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Uruguay were among the winners of the King of Spain International Journalism Awards on Jan. 24 in its 34th edition, news agency EFE reported.
In nearly eight years of anticipation for the 2016 Olympic Games, the reporters who occupied the city of Rio de Janeiro tried to understand one of the most complex Carioca characteristics to "translate:" the favelas. Between 2008 and 2016, the volume of articles published in the international press that mentioned these communities rose almost seven times, to a total of 1,094 reports.
A group of Brazilian journalists, researchers and media have joined to create a kind of stamp of credibility for journalism. The project, a partnership between the Institute for the Development of Journalism (Projor) and Paulista State University (Unesp), sponsored by Google Brazil, wants to develop protocols and tools to identify and certify reliable content on the internet. The aim is to differentiate quality journalism from noise online, in the face of a global wave of fake news.
Although the number of murders of journalists in the world has dropped from record levels, two Latin American countries are among the deadliest for communicators in 2016, according to the year-end report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Journalist Thiago Antunes was working in the newsroom of newspaper O Dia on Nov. 28, 2015 when news broke at dawn: 111 shots from rifles and pistols were fired by the military police at five youths in the Lagartixa favela in Costa Barros, a poor neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro’s northern zone.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its acronym in French), a nonprofit organization that defends freedoms of expression and information, has been investing in Brazil to increase visibility and presence in the country. In 2015, RSF opened a regional office for Latin America in Rio de Janeiro and launched a version of its site in Portuguese at the end of November 2016.
The Gilberto Velho Media and Drugs reporting prize, which has acknowledged five Brazilian journalists in its third edition, aims to encourage and improve the quality of the public debate on drug policies and legislation in the South American country. The 2016 winners of the prize were announced on Dec. 2.
The 14th Latin American Investigative Journalism Award honored works that uncovered extrajudicial executions in Mexico, violent conflicts over land and timber in Brazil and the trafficking of cultural heritage throughout the region.
A Såo Paulo court recently ruled that investigators could access Matais’ telephone records. The decision was related to a series of reports written by the journalist in Folha de S. Paulo newspaper in 2012. Matais now works at O Estado de S. Paulo.