Journalists in Argentina had plenty to say last week about their sour relationship with the country's political leaders -- and the problems that threaten the profession from within.
Internet use is growing rapidly in Latin America, and traditional media groups are exploring digital paid content strategies to try to protect and consolidate their dominant position, especially in the face of competition from new digital-only news organizations.
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.
Brazil’s main newspapers abandoned Google News after the world’s top search engine refused to compensate them for the rights to their headlines. The mass rush started last year when the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil, or ANJ, began recommending its members to opt out of the service.
After pardoning the journalists in a $40 million libel lawsuit against the newspaper El Universo, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa once again attacked the press, saying that in Latin America there exists a "media dictatorship" and that now is the time for "free citizens to rebel against this abuse," reported the news agency EFE.
“The immigrant is the prophet of the future, it is who we are becoming,” said Sandy Close in her keynote speech at the 9th Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas on Saturday, Sept. 10.
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.
What was supposed to be a debate about the Middle East on the program Manhattan Connection, on the Brazilian channel Globonews, ended up creating a diplomatic crisis between Brazil and Jordan when the journalist Caio Blinder called Queen Rania de Jordania a “piranha” while commenting about first ladies of the region, reported The Telegraph.
O Estado do Paraná newspaper, whose print edition circulated in Curitiba for 59 years, will abandon print and go entirely online, Folha de S. Paulo and Meio & Mensagem report.
For Argentine publisher and journalist Jorge Fontevecchia, many activists who support President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – those aligned with so-called kirchnerismo – are prone to distorting the truth due to a mix of ideology and resentment. “[T]hey always aspired for notoriety, transcendence, influence, or the visibility that the big media has, [and] never got it and… kirchnerismo heals their frustration,” Fontevecchia controversially writes in his column for Perfil. Fontevecchia is the founder and editor of the newspaper.