Globally, Newspapers Are Thinking Locally

By: Mark Fitzgerald I was a speaker the other day at a seminar for the senior editors of some of the leading dailies in Latin America, and as usual I walked away having learned far more than I imparted.

One thing I learned is that in the past year or so, some big-city Latin American dailies have adopted the "local, local, local" mantra that many metro in the U.S. see as their best shot in the digital era. But while U.S. and Latin papers are going hyper-local because of the Web there seems to be a slight but intriguing difference in their strategies.

This was a seminar that asked big questions, starting with its Spanish title that translated as "Journalism As An Agent For Social Change." The discussion ranged from the deeply philosophical to the prosaic.

The day started, for instance, with Leonardo C. Ferreira, assistant dean of the University of Miami's College of Communications, talking in Spanish about how the "cultural de-territorialization" of the Web demands a new definition of the news. And it ended with Jose Antonio Ferris Fores, strategic director for PrisaCom, answering in English my question about the partnership the Madrid daily El Pais has with a big Spanish Web classified network. "This is our last chance," he said. "If we lose this one, we're done."

After my talk, I was approached by editors interested both in the copies of RedEye I had to illustrate the Chicago Tribune's portfolio of products, but also the newer TribLocal papers it has launched in some suburbs. Residents post news and images on a Web site, with some material reverse-published in free weekly tabloids.

But editors from O Globo in Rio de Janeiro and El Tiempo in Bogota, Colombia, were also on hand to relate their new experiences publishing hyper-locally.

Listening to the editors describe the reasons for going local, local, local, I noticed a subtle, but I think telling, difference from the rationale of U.S. newspapers. Here the idea is that local news is the one franchise that differentiates newspapers from any other media pretenders. And with multi-media hyper-local initiatives, newspapers can offer the model of social networking with the power of print to encourage constant refreshment of the Web site.

The Latin papers were reacting to the Web, too -- but they seem to see their local efforts as ways to imitate the Web's interactivity and its encouragement of self-expression.

"People want to narrate their stories," El Tiempo Editor in Chief Ernesto Cortes Fierro said. "People want to resolve their own problems. It is two-way content, and in a way it is a mutual rediscovery of the newspaper and the citizens."

"The Power of Local" was the title Cortes Fierro gave to his presentation. The paper has just marked the first anniversary of its El Tiempo Zona newspapers that take their content entirely from citizens in the neighborhood.

Even the editorial board of each paper is what El Tiempo calls a "board of friends" made up of people from every walk in life who are influential in the neighborhood. Typically, Cortes Fierro said, they will include the parish priest or the well-known retired person who's the unofficial "mayor" of his block.

"We don't have reporters because the reporters don't know the neighborhood, the neighbors know the neighborhood," he said.

And the papers suspend many of the rules of journalism, he added. "Irreverence is valued," he said.

The first anniversary issued showed neighbors marching with a banner that said, "One year of journalism with the people."

O Globo takes a different approach in its 10 neighborhood papers called Jornal de Bairro. While much of the material comes from citizen journalists -- everybody in the newsroom, including top editors, are expected to help out with the papers, said Sandra Cohen, a section editor and journalism director of Grupo de Diarios America (GDA), a consortium of 11 of the hemisphere's biggest and most influential dailies.

The papers are proving successful, she said, and are attracting small-business advertisers who could never afford O Globo's rates.

Not every citizen journalist effort is an unalloyed success. When street demonstrations by university students in Venezuela last fall began to turn the tide against President Hugo Chavez's proposed constitutional changes, the Caracas daily El Nacional gave students 15 video cameras to use for its Web site.

The newspaper got some great footage, and it got a huge spike in Web traffic. "But they never gave the cameras back," Antonio Fernandez of El Nacional said.

The seminar was sponsored by the Miami-based GDA and the Caracas-based Corporacion Andina de Fomento (CAF) with the collaboration of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) and the University of Miami's College of Communication.