By: Mark Fitzgerald
El Espectador, the Bogota daily newspaper that in the 1980s became a symbol of the courage Colombian journalists showed in the face of bombings and assassinations, will become a weekly beginning next Sunday.
"I have the honor of directing the oldest newspaper in Colombia, one that is 115 years old, and that is why I feel an obligation to keep it alive whatever the consequences," Editor Carlos Lleras de La Fuente said in a press conference Wednesday, according to an account in today's Web edition of
El Tiempo, the rival Bogota daily.
Lleras de la Fuente said the board of directors of the paper's owner, Valores Bavaria, a conglomerate controlled by Bogota businessman Julio Mario Santo Domingo, concluded early this week that the paper "should concentrate on the niche in which its strongest, the niche in which it has the most advertising and readers -- that is on Sundays." Like other papers,
El Espectador had been losing ad linage. The editor said it had declined 51% between 1998 and 2000.
Unlike others in the nation, the paper's circulation has also been on a steady decline in recent years. Its circulation is about 60,000 weekdays and 75,000 on Sundays. By contrast, the Santos family-owned
El Tiempo, the nation's largest daily, has weekday sales of about 380,000 and a Sunday circulation of 630,000.
Free press advocates worldwide rallied around
El Espectador in 1986 when editor Guillermo Cano, whose family then owned the paper, was shot to death as he left the newspaper's offices by assassins hired by the late Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar. Three years later, a bomb planted by the drug cartel extensively damaged the newspaper building.
Though it continued to report fearlessly, it was in deep financial trouble by the end of the 1980s. In 1997, the paper was taken over by its bank lenders and sold to Santo Domingo's group.
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