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Huertas: Developing the next generation BOGOTA, Colombia -- Independent news media in Latin America often lack the financial resources to act as a counterweight to the political powers and multinational businesses in the region. But these media, many of them digital natives, have found that by banding together they can multiply their scarce resources and magnify their impact beyond their borders to challenge these powers. One example is a platform for journalists interested in investigative journalism, Connectas.org, based in Bogota, which organizes training and operates a collaboration hub for investigative journalists (in Spanish, ConnectasHub), offers grants of up to $3,000 , and publishes investigative projects from all over the region. Versi�n en espa�ol The founder and director of Connectas, Carlos Eduardo Huertas , told me in an interview that the goal of the platform is to "pull together a new generation of journalists with training in practical methods of doing in-depth...

Women are taking a leadership role in the development of digital journalism in Latin America, according to a new study of 100 startups. The study, Inflection Point , by SembraMedia in partnership with Omidyar Network, offers many clues to achieving the elusive goal of sustainability for new digital media. Click to enlarge. One clue is that women have the skills and experience to lead the way: 62% of the 100 organizations in the study had at least one woman founder, and women represented 38% of the total founders of all the media (p. 41 in the PDF version ). Extensive interviews with the founders -- 25 each from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico -- produced data that clarified the elements of successful business models and showed the best places to invest resources and training. "This finding suggests that women are taking advantage of the low barriers to entry in digital media startups to go around the glass ceilings of traditional media and build their own publishing compa...

A new study of 100 digital news startups in Latin America by SembraMedia in partnership with Omidyar Network -- Inflection Point -- offers many clues to achieving the elusive goal of sustainability. Extensive interviews with the founders -- 25 each from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico -- produced data that clarified the elements of successful business models and showed the best places to invest resources and training. Janine Warner , co-founder of SembraMedia and an ICFJ Knight Fellow, directed the study, which was managed by her co-founder, Mijal Iastebner. (Disclosure: I participated in the study as an editor.) Among the insights: You don't need a lot of money to get started. 71% of the media in this study had startup capital of less than $10,000, but a tenth of those now generate at least $500,000 in revenues (p. 8). Those that focus on business development do best. Those with at least one sales person reported median annual revenues of $117,000; those with no sales ...

Renaissance maps showed monsters, hazards to avoid. The future of journalism is increasingly digital, mobile, and in flux. It is unexplored territory. Like the explorers and navigators of the Renaissance, various organizations � governments, NGOs, journalism groups, and universities, among others � have been trying to map the most promising routes to sustainability in the new media ecosystem. It's not just about making money; it's about providing news and information crucial to a democratic society. Versi�n en espa�ol (At left, a map from Chet Van Duzer's book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps . Click to enlarge.) As traditional news media organizations have lost revenues, laid off employees, and reduced coverage, new digital media have emerged as important players in providing public-service journalism, especially on the local level. Databases and promising routes Researchers from a variety of organizations have created databases of thousands of new...

Latin America has spawned a rich breed of online news publishers who are challenging mainstream journalism. These digital natives have achieved significant influence by innovating with digital tools. They often aim to provide an alternative to the traditional voice of mainstream media, which are usually linked to political and business interests that have long predominated in these countries. "Digital-ness" of highly influential websites. These are among the findings of a new study of 67 native-born digital news publications by Ramon Salaverria of the University of Navarra (Spain) and Summer Harlow of Florida State University. The study , published in the journal Digital Journalism , is an ambitious effort to measure the innovation, influence, and goals of these 67 digital natives -- "Regenerating Journalism: Exploring the 'alternativeness' and 'digital-ness' of Online-Native Media in Latin America". And while the scholars have not set out to creat...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The United States has been the world's biggest market for just about everything, including illegal drugs , and that creates big problems for its neighbors. Carla Minet Versi�n en espa�ol So much money from the drug trade flows into Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean that it corrupts governments, courts, police, armed forces, trade regulators, and other institutions that were not that strong to begin with. The result is that many of these countries are ruled, de facto, by the whims of organized crime and not in the public interest. Criminal organizations have gone global, and investigative journalists need to go global as well in order to expose this corruption and serve their communities better. Cross-border cooperation was the big takeaway from a three-day meeting of investigative journalists from 17 countries in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 4-6. Billed as " The First Caribbean Meeting of Investigative Journalists: Tracking the Stories t...

A year ago I wrote an article about digital media startups around the world and attempts to categorize and analyze them. Some of that material is now a bit dated, and I have come across some other analyses and lists that have good road maps for media entrepreneurs . The Open Society Foundations has sponsored a series of studies. One of them is Publishing for Peanuts: Innovation and the Journalism Startup , by JJ Robinson, Kristen Grennan, and Anya Schiffrin of the Columbia University School of International and Political Affairs. The study takes an in-depth look at 35 "innovative media outlets" producing high-quality news that have a chance at long-term survival. Researchers have often neglected examples outside of Europe and North America, so this study included examples from South Africa , China , Brazil , Mexico , Colombia , India , Kenya , Nigeria , Egypt , and Bosnia Herzegovina , among others. Read more �

Julio Alonso, director general WeblogsSL (James Breiner photo) BURGOS, Spain -- In 2004, management consultant Julio Alonso got the itch to write about gadgets and technology. He started a blog and a year later that evolved into the website Xataka . Since then he and his partners have built WeblogsSL , a community of 36 websites in Spanish with more than 13 million unique visitors a month. The sites focus on autos, lifestyle, business, leisure, and technology. They have survived the global financial crisis, which hit particularly hard in Spain. And they have expanded their websites to Mexico and recently Colombia . (Versi�n del blog en espa�ol) However, Alonso, 45, struggles with what to do about the latest tsunami of change. The audience has flooded to mobile devices and advertisers are going with them. He has more than a decade of experience in the business of digital media, and an international perspective, having studied in Holland and worked in Brazil and Italy, among other place...

Versi�n en espa�ol. Erick Falcon started out as a journalist. Mainly he liked writing about science, technology, and fine food in long feature articles as a freelancer for the Sunday magazine of El Universal newspaper. That might seem like a strange mix, but he lives in Ensenada, Mexico, on the northwest coast, about 65 miles south of Tijuana. Ensenada, with population of about 470,000, is in the heart of Mexico's wine country and also is a center of research, in particular the Center of Scientific Investigation and Higher Education . In 2010 he wrote about agriculture in the desert (Spanish, PDF), an article that Reuters recognized as the best environmental reporting for Latin America in 2010. He wrote in Spanish and English, including for Cosmos magazine in Australia. Then late in 2011, everything changed. El Universal decided to shut down its magazine, Dia Siete, that had been his main source of income. He was not going to be able to earn enough from his other freelance source...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Univision has been the most important Spanish language media company in the U.S. Now its digital news arm is taking aim at the 500 million Spanish speakers around the world. Borja Echevarria , its digital editor-in-chief, says his team is at the beginning of an initiative aimed at Spanish speakers in Latin America and globally. "Fishermen in the desert," Univision's report on a lake that dried up in Bolivia. �We are covering topics that might occur in Bolivia but that could be related to something that occurs in Colombia or in Peru . We are not trying to attack highly local topics, at least not in this first stage. We are looking for topics of international interest.� He made his comments to me in an interview in April on the sidelines of the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Versi�n en espa�ol An example of the kind of coverage he described was Univision.com�s multimedia package on Lake Poop�, the second-largest in Bolivia, which dried u...