For the first time ever, online advertising revenue is set to eclipse print ad sales in the United States by the end of 2012, Poynter reported on its website Thursday, Oct. 18. Climbing online ad sales will likely not lend a hand to struggling legacy media, however.
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.
The economic good fortunes of Brazil, as increased newspaper circulation and online advertising revenue show, seem to have caught the attention of foreign media companies. Last Sunday, the New York Times announced its plans to launch a Portuguese site in Brazil during the second half of 2013.
The Honduran digital newspaper Hondudiario announced that it was the target of a cyber attack that left its website out of service for 48 hours on Friday, Oct. 12, according to the Committee for Free Expression in Honduras (C-Libre in Spanish). Since 2009, the online publication has reported other threats and attacks, the worst of which was the killing of one of its reporters in August 2012. The crime remains unsolved.
Carlos Dada, the editor and founder of El Salvador’s El Faro news website, received the Anna Politkovskaya Award on Oct. 5 for the website’s investigative journalism and reporting. The prize honors Russian reporter and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006 in Moscow. The prize is given by the Italian weekly publication Internazionale and goes to journalists working in hazardous situations or regions.
Two young Mexican engineers developed an application for iPhone and iPad that turns users into citizen journalists when they report public security concerns, from broken traffic lights to police corruption and armed assault via Twitter, reported the website Texas Observer.
Tico Times editor David Boddiger could already see the writing on the wall by the time he joined the newspaper two years ago.
After a series of increasingly aggressive threats from an ex-commander of the Rondas Ostensivas Tobias de Aguiar (ROTA in Portuguese), an arm of the São Paulo Military Police, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo moved its reporter André Caramante to an undisclosed location for his security, reported the newspaper Brasil de Fato.
The newspaper Diário de Natal, which circulates in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, announced the end of its print edition on Tuesday, Oct. 2, reported the news website No Minuto. In a statement, the newspaper's management said the newspaper would transition to an online-only format and that it would "prioritize and amplify the electronic version."
The Information Safety bill that is currently being considered by Panama’s National Assembly could represent a threat to freedom of expression in that country, according to several journalists’ unions and associations, the newspaper La Estrella reported.
The United States and Cuba are at opposite extremes of Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net 2012 report. According to the New York-based organization, the United States was ranked the second most “free” country in the world for online expression, while Cuba was listed as the second to worst.
Costa Rica’s oldest English-language newspaper, The Tico Times, announced on its website that it would stop publishing its print edition as of Friday, Sept. 28. The Associated Press reported that the 56-year-old newspaper laid off its entire 16-person staff on Tuesday, Sept. 25, and will restructure its business into an online-only publication.