INNOVATIVE BRAZILIAN PAPER GETS NOTICED

By: Mark Fitzgerald 'Valor' Is Joint Venture Of Two Media Giants


CHICAGO -- Valor Economico celebrated its first birthday
only last Wednesday, but the Brazilian financial daily is already
getting attention from publishers around Latin America -- and
from industry experts in the United States.

"Valor is something really new, innovative, a model of
modernity," newspaper consultant Juan Antonio Giner enthused in
his International Newspaper Marketing Association column last
week. "You do not need to know Portuguese to realize ... you are
looking at one of the most interesting newspapers ever
published."

Valor is the improbable creation of two Brazilian media
giants that have historically been antagonists: Organizacoes
Globo, publisher of O Globo in Rio de Janeiro, and Folha,
whose flagship Folha de Sao Paulo is the biggest in the
city. Together, they invested $50 million to launch what's best
described as a breezy financial newspaper. Valor is a
colorful, graphic-intense, standard broadsheet that looks like a
peacock next to Brazil's biggest and most entrenched financial
paper, Gazeta Mercantil. At age 81, Gazeta features
the wider web width and conservative, text-heavy design
associated with The Wall Street Journal.

For U.S. newspapers, the most interesting thing about
Valor is that it has apparently hit on a new market for
business dailies. In one year of competition, Valor says
it has amassed 80,000 in circulation -- 90% of that in
subscriptions -- while Gazeta's audited circulation has
increased from 117,000 to a record 125,000. "The fact that
[Gazeta] didn't lose readership -- just the opposite, in
fact -- shows that our premise was true: There is a group of
people who are interested in business, but they were not buying a
[financial] newspaper because no paper appealed to them," said
Valor Managing Editor Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva.

These readers, Valor believes, are young and sophisticated
-- but working, for now, in middle management. Valor is
reaching them with a design from three British designers, a mix
of articles that goes beyond company finances to include
political developments and cultural coverage, and a writing
style, Lins da Silva said, that is "simpler without being
shallow."

At the moment, Valor competitor Gazeta is on a
roll. Advertising last year ran 46% ahead of 1999, more than
three times the Brazilian newspaper average. (And unlike their
U.S. counterparts, Brazilian papers expect another good year in
2001.) Gazeta editions circulate across the Spanish-
speaking world and even run weekly in Miami's El Nuevo
Herald. A Gazeta top executive, who insisted on
anonymity, suggested Valor would sink under the cost of
its expensive circulation promotions -- and trouble between its
two owners now that Globo's recent purchase of Diario
Popular puts it in direct competition against Folha's Sao
Paulo daily.

Certainly, Valor's subscription enticements outclass the
coffee mugs and tote bags offered by U.S. papers. The paper's
come-ons have included airline tickets and cell phones. Right
now, it is giving away a Palm IIIxe for an 18-month subscription.
But circulation and advertising, which ran 1,500 pages last year,
is "way ahead of our goal," Lins da Silva said. As for trouble at
the top: One result of Valor's unique ownership, he added,
is that both corporate bosses leave the paper alone.

Americas Extra Roundup

Two journalists were murdered within just one week in
Colombia. Before he was found dead in Bogota last Tuesday,
broadcast sports reporter Carlos Alberto Trespalacios Yal' had
notified authorities of threats on his life. He was found with a
deposition about the threats in his pocket, the Bogota daily
El Tiempo reported. In the broad daylight of April 27 in
Tumaco near the Ecuador border, four gunmen on motorcycles shot
and killed Flavio Bedoya as the correspondent for the leftist
weekly paper Voz stepped off a bus. The New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists reported colleagues believe he
was killed for reporting on links between local security forces
and right-wing paramilitary squads.

Chile's parliament voted to repeal parts of the national
security and "insult" (or desacato) laws used to ban "The Black
Book of Chilean Justice" and prosecute its author, Alejandra
Matus. Matus, whose exile to the United States was featured in
"Americas Extra" March 5, said she is
awaiting developments in her case before returning to Chile. "We
are happy," she said, "but cautious -- very cautious."

President Miguel Angel Rodriguez last month submitted
legislation to repeal Costa Rica's "insult" laws that provides
criminal penalties for publishing even truthful information if it
"offends the honor" of certain government officials and
institutions.

Alejandro Junco de la Vega, director of the Reforma Group
chain and editor of its flagship Reforma daily in
Mexico City was charged, along with Reforma reporter
Carolina Pavon, with criminal libel at the instigation of the
former Federal District President Rosario Robles. The official
claims she was defamed by an April 12 article reporting public
funds disappeared during her term as the equivalent of Mexico
City mayor. In a May 2 protest statement, Inter American Press
Association President Danilo Arbilla, editor of the Montevideo,
Uruguay, weekly Busqueda, noted that Reforma papers
have been hit with 14 similar criminal charges in the last four
months, most of them initiated by public officials.



Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is editor at large for E&P.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.