Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico placed in the top 20 deadliest countries for journalists in 2014, according to a special year-end report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
In Brazil and Mexico, ranked seventh and eleventh by the Committee to Protect Journalists as the countries with the highest levels of impunity in the murder of journalists, two advocacy groups are mapping these attacks in an effort to increase their security.
After being sentenced to seven months in prison for writing a fictional essay, journalist Cristian Góes has been ordered to pay 30 thousand Brazilian Reals (US$11,300) in compensation for moral damages to judge Edson Ulisses, vice president of the Sergipe Justice Tribunal.
Impunity in the murder of journalists is not new in Latin America. In the last decade, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported 72 instances of journalists killed for their work. About 78 percent of these cases faced complete or partial impunity. But in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, levels of impunity have surpassed those of any other Latin American country, according to CPJ’s 2014 Global Impunity Index.
When the North American missionary Dorothy Mae Stang was killed in 2005, the Amazon region, its people and its conflicts, briefly dominated the front pages of newspapers across the country. Before the crime, the project Dorothy had been developing since the 1970s to defend the forest and communities of Anapu in the southwestern region of the Pará state, had never made it into mainstream media.
Paraguayan journalist Pablo Medina Velázquez, murdered in the northeastern Canindeyú department while working on assignment, is the third journalist to be killed in the country this year and the latest in a series of journalists to be killed in the region in recent years. His death underscores the dangerous and deteriorating conditions for journalists working along the Brazilian border.
Mainstream media coverage of Brazilian protests in June, 2013, both on websites and Twitter, highlighted riots and acts of vandalism, rather than demands made by protestors, according to a University of Texas researcher. The findings, which shed light on the role of media in the portrayal of protests, were presented at the 2014 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in Montreal, Canada.
The ability to cope with a disruptive environment and an awareness of new technological resources are key skills for the 21st century journalist. This was the lesson highlighted by a group of eight students who participated in a recent Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. The students won scholarships to attend the 10th Brazilian Congress of Newspapers (CBJ by its initials in Portuguese) and visit the facilities of Google Brasil.
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 with that collaboration and is excited about the results of the initiative. This Tuesday (June 24th)
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.
Paraguayan journalist Fausto Gabriel Alcaraz was shot and killed on Friday May 16 in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero, on the border with Brazil, several local media outlets reported.