JOURNALISM IN THE AMERICASA News Blog
While celebrating the heroic actions of first responders, reporters covering the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas are witnessing the shock of some 40,000 people for whom the base was a refuge from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where many served. read more »
Some 500 editors and publishers are gathered in Buenos Aires for the Inter American Press Association's Annual Assembly, taking place Nov. 6–10. read more »
In an essay for Columbia Journalism Review, writer Jordan Michael Smith says the capture of U.S. diplomats by Iranian students 30 years ago this week had “pernicious” effects on the U.S. public’s attitude on Iran. read more »
Other Related Headlines: » Photo exhibit from 1979 Iran hostage crisis mirrors today's unrest (Canadian Press)
» See photographer Peter Bregg's images of Iran (CBC.ca)
» 30 Years Later: Ted Koppel on Nightline's Evolution (TV Newser/Mediabistro)
The application deadlines for international applicants to the 2010-2011 Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University and the Knight Fellowships at Stanford University are Dec. 15, 2009. (U.S. applicants have later deadlines.) Both programs are open to professional journalists from Latin American and the Caribbean. read more »
Access to Twitter has been available until now only in English and Japanese. But this week, the microblogging network launched a Spanish version that was translated from English by volunteer collaborators, EFE and CNET explain. read more »
Other Related Headlines: » New online tools translate tweets and entire sites (Knight Center)
An unidentified person hurled a fragmentation grenade at an influential radio station, HRN, while it was broadcasting the "Tegucigalpa at Night" program. A radio technician and one other person received minor injuries from falling debris, AFP reports. read more »
The Supreme Court rejected a challenge by the owner of Caracas-based radio station CNB 102.3, which sought to annul the state telecom regulator’s August decision to close the station, AFP reports. read more »
The international blogging community Global Voices has launched Threatened Voices, a site that tracks the suppression of online expression. The site centralizes information from a range of free speech advocacy networks with a map and timeline of threats, arrests, and violence due to online speech. read more »
The armed conflict that has afflicted the country since the 1960s has had an impact on the press, and on thousands of citizens. The site Verdad Abierta (Open Truth), which aims to cover the many dimensions of paramilitary action, is using multimedia tools to tell the stories of victims. read more »
The owner of the Toronto Star, Canada’s most widely circulated paper, plans to replace 100 unionized editors—one in three of its newsroom staff—with employees working on contract, probably outside the country, Bloomberg reports, citing a union leader. read more »
Protesters belonging to the truck drivers' union prevented Clarín and La Nación from leaving their printing plants, Momento 24 reports. Only a portion of the dailies could be delivered in some provinces in the interior. read more »
Ten hours after Bladimir Antuna, crime reporter for El Tiempo newspaper, was kidnapped while driving to work, his body was found outside a hospital in Durango City, Durango, the AFP news agency and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) report. read more »
Other Related Headlines: » IAPA laments Mexican Congress’ indifference to crimes against journalists (Knight Center)
The first night I drove into Austin, Texas, in 1993, I’d never logged onto the Internet, but I already knew of the city’s attractions, including the Sixth Street live music magnet. read more »
In its 137th public session Nov. 2-6 in Washington, DC, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) will consider freedom of expression complaints from several Latin American countries. See the schedule here. read more »
Other Related Headlines: » Hostile coexistence between governments and the media in Latin America (Spanish) (Bitácora)
Patricia Orozco, a radio host and director of the Autonomous Women’s Movement, complained to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) that police used "an excess of violence" when they arrested her last week in the city of León, EFE reports. read more »
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva repeated criticisms of the press, this time before approximately 3,000 sanitation workers in São Paulo, leading the crowd to boo the reporters covering his speech, Folha de São Paulo and O Globo report. read more »
A paper by economists Rafael Di Tella of Harvard and Ignacio Franceschelli of Northwestern shows a strong correlation between government advertising dollars and front-page newspaper coverage of corruption scandals, Joshua Benton reports for the Nieman Journalism Lab. read more »
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