Happy Friday! We’re covering today a new way to cripple local news organizations in Brazil. The official 2019 inflation rate. And the newest move by a massive post-Car Wash graft probe. (This newsletter is for premium subscribers only. Become one now!)
How to smother local news
As Brazil’s economy peaked in the late 2000s, so did newsrooms across the country. But as the crisis came, the impact on the journalism business was as brutal as could possibly be imagined. And while newsrooms have shrunk—in a process not restricted to Brazil—journalist Murillo Camarotto noted a curious trend in the northeastern state of Pernambuco: reporters of the state’s two most-influential papers were quitting their jobs to work for the institutions they used to investigate.
His findings were published in the research “Local Media in Brazil: draining the newsrooms in the country’s poorest region,” by the Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford.
Bottom line. Instead of clashing with news organizations, local administrations have coopted top reporters with high salaries, diminishing the checks and balances they are supposed to be subjected to.
Why it matters. Recent studies show that as local newsrooms lose steam, residents become less informed, less engaged in their...