Always On Sunday

By: Mark Fitzgerald I'll bet a lot of people in the newspaper industry were surprised at the announcement the other day that The Plain Dealer in Cleveland was folding its Sunday magazine -- surprised that The Plain Dealer still published a Sunday magazine.

Home-made Sunday supplements disappeared from the vast majority of city dailies more than a decade ago. The Nov. 9 announcement that Cleveland would fold its in December was about as momentous as news that another paper was narrowing its web width.

But I got thinking about the P-D's Sunday magazine during four days spent in Mexico City after Thanksgiving.

Somehow, newspapers down there are actually adding Sunday magazines -- and one Mexico City daily, the Ealy family's El Universal, now publishes a full-blown magazine on Mondays.

In just the last five years, Mexico City's newspaper market has emerged as one of the most vital on the continent, churning out new publications and reinventing old ones with a dizzying energy.

I was last in Mexico City just after Easter, and in the few months since it seems to have taken another leap forward.

Consider Sunday magazines, for instance. The ones in the papers now are not your padre's Mexican newspaper supplements, which tended to be thin newsprint sections presenting thick texts of literary musings.

Instead, they pop with color, and innovative and thoughtful content presentation. El Universal's Monday magazine, La Revista, is full-color on each page of slick paper, and ran to 56 pages this week.

Maybe one difference between the growth in supplements there and their disappearance here, is that Mexican publishers look at them -- and whole sections of their daily product -- as marketing opportunities.

So often in the U.S., these now-gone magazines -- some of them still missed, such as Tropic in The Miami Herald -- were regarded as something the publisher was tossing in the Sunday collection basket: It might make you feel good, but it wasn't money you were going to see again.

That's not, apparently, how they see it in Mexico City. La Revista comes free inside the Monday edition of the paper, which is priced at the higher end of the city's dailies at 12 pesos, or about $1.20. But it also sells as a standalone for 20 pesos.

Mexico City papers are tearing their products apart, and selling them in pieces or as wholes.

For instance, Reforma, the Junca family-owned daily that vies with El Universal as the city's biggest broadsheet, now sells its sports section every day as a standalone. Gancha is a handsome tabloid that is full-color in every image on every page. Unlike La Revista, it does not sell at a premium. It's free inside the pricey Reforma daily, but sells for just 5 pesos, or about 50 cents, as a standalone.

There's an increasingly fierce competition for the sports fan in Mexico City. The most handsome of the lot is R?cord. Like most other norteamericanos, I find soccer an eye-glazingly dull sport, but the tabloid R?cord -- which devoted 34 of its 64 pages to The Beautiful Game in last Friday's issue -- presents soccer reporting with eye-dazzling verve.

R?cord does include other sports, including well-packaged reporting on "futbol americano," you know, the NFL. The Notmusa-owned paper further justifies its 7 peso, 70-cent, cover price with stabs at being a full-service daily that include a thin pull-out entertainment tab and two pages of national and world news it labels "Todos Menos Deportes," everything but sports. (The sports pages that follow soccer, or "futbol," coverage are labeled "Everything But Soccer," abbreviated as "TMF.")

Every major daily has a colorful sports section, including the left-leaning political daily La Jornada, which is perhaps the only paper that in every other way, from its tabloid front-page to the back, has not changed its gray design during the Vicente Fox presidency.

Fox's defeat in 2000 of the PRI party that ran Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years ended a cozy system of effectively government subsidies for most newspapers, forcing them to survive on their own -- and opening the market to new and independent papers.

The competition is evident on the streets and in the overflowing kiosks of Mexico City. El Universal and Reforma contend not only with their upmarket broadsheets, but both publish downmarket tabs priced at 5 pesos.

With its heavy mix of political news, Impacto, a handsome tabloid that is not yet a year old, appears directly targeted at the equally good-looking and more established Milenio. The difference: Milenio sells for almost a dollar; Impacto goes for about 20 cents.

In Mexico City now, there's a newspaper that ties into a TV show, Diario Monitor, and one that young women were giving out free outside churches Sunday that apparently ties into a radio station.

And as newspapers shrink in the United States, they just keep coming in Mexico City. Last Friday, I picked up Diario El Capitalino, a paper I'd never seen before.

I quickly saw the reason why on the masthead. "Year 1," it read, "Number 23."

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NOTES FROM THE PAN-AM HIGHWAY
An occasional report on the working conditions for Latin American journalists.

ARGENTINA:

The Union Circle of the Press of C?rdoba demonstrated in support of reporter Mariano Saravia of the daily La Voz del Interior in November to protest what it says is a pattern of harassment, intimidation and threats against her, apparently launched by former police authorities angered by her book "The Blue Shadow," which exposes abuses during the military dictatorship of the 1980s.

HAITI

Haitian journalists have formed a new press organization, S.O.S. Journalistes, to "improve the socio-economic conditions of media professionals at all levels," the Haiti Support Group reported Nov. 17. Joseph Guyler Delva of Reuters is secretary-general of the new association in a nation notorious for intimidation of the press.

MEXICO:

Israel Gonz?lez P?rez, head of the national human rights commission charged with attacks against journalists, said the investigation into the disappearance and presumed murder of reporter Alfredo Jimenez Mota of the Hermosillo daily El Imparcial has been a failure because the resources devoted to the search by local and federal authorities were "totally inadequate." No trace of the reporter has been uncovered since he went missing last April 2.

At a campaign stop Nov. 27, former Mexico City Mayor Andr?s Manuel L?pez Obrador, the front runner in the 2006 presidential election, accused the Grupo Reforma newspaper company of running a "media desafuero" against him. The candidate, known universally by his initials AMLO, last spring turned back an attempt by political opponents to use the "desafuero" process to make him ineligible for the presidency for alleged contempt of court. "The newspapers of the Grupo Reforma seem like the official bulletin of the (ruling PAN) party," AMLO said, according to an account in Reforma, the Mexico City daily.

VENEZUELA

A copy editor for the Caracas daily La Naci?n was killed Nov. 24 by several unknown persons who appeared at the doorway of her home in a high-crime neighborhood, the newspaper El Universal reported. It wasn't clear if the murder had anything to do with the journalism work of the editor, Enis M?ndez de Garmendia. However, the account in El Universal noted that nothing was taken from her but a cell phone, and that the method of the crime had many believing it was the work of hired killers. The neighborhood Garmendia, 60, lived in has had more than 450 murders by firearms so far this year, the newspaper reported.