Colombia: seminar on the future of journalism ends in Cartagena

The Andean Development Corporation (CAF), in alliance with the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation (FNPI), and the support of Cemex and the Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española (Spanish Cooperation Training Center), held a seminar on The future of journalism and the professional development of journalists in Latin America, on June 25 in Cartagena, Colombia. The seminar is part of the program of reflection on the key issues facing journalism in the region, which CAF has been successfully promoting since 2003 jointly with FNPI.

CAF President & CEO Enrique García said that the strategic alliance of the Corporation with the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation (FNPI) was promoting a positive transformation in the business and professional practices of Latin American journalism, offering opportunities for training and exchange for professional development through forums and workshops, such as the recent event on investigative reporting in arts and culture.

The Foundation was set up in 1994 on the initiative of the Colombian journalist and writer Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Laureate for Literature 1982, based on his wish to share experiences and stimulate the vocation of young reporters, and his conviction that the most efficient method of learning is through practical and participative workshops where experienced instructors discuss the carpentry of the profession with the students, stimulating debate, innovation, the ethics of reporting, and improving the media.

The purpose of the seminar was to reflect the challenges involved in the training of journalists over the next ten years. All the speakers - in their area of professional knowledge, interests and action - focused on answering a key question, which became the leit motiv of the seminar: What are the abilities and skills of journalists that the organizations committed to the protection of quality journalism in Latin America should try to strengthen through relevant and effective programs?

Based on this premise, the expectations of photojournalism, television, radio and news agencies were analyzed by the speakers Stephen Ferry (United States) of The New York Times; Darío Fernando Patiño (Colombia) of Canal Caracol; and Alex Grijelmo (Spain), president of EFE new agency.

Ferry spoke on the lack of prestige and the unexploited talent of Latin American photo reporters in the media. Patiño said that the good use of technology, together with good narration tools, was fundamental for the quality of television journalism. Grijelmo, referring to the news agencies, said they had to adapt like the newspapers if they wanted to survive in the world of Internet.

Participants in the FNPI workshop presented issues for the agenda that journalism has to keep in its sights in the next few years, such as migration, urban violence and social inequality. "In Colombia alone, we have four million migrants," said Juanita Léon, report editor of Semana magazine.

Luis Miguel González, editorial director of the Mexican daily Público, spoke on the need for a renewal of economic journalism. "We have specialized to such an extent that we have lost sensitivity. We do not show the faces or the pocketbooks of the people affected by the markets." Concern for the weaknesses of the coverage of social issues was expressed by Cristian Alarcón: "The neo-liberal model has generated urban territories of an unimagined violence that we don’t know how to address."

At the end of the seminar, the Journalism Memory Center project was presented which, based on the Foundation’s activities over ten years, will be a benchmark for quality journalism. "The Foundation is Latin American, but when we receive mail with concerns about the profession from Morocco or Belgium, I believe we can have a global impact," said Alberto Abello, one of the promoters of the project with the journalist and researcher Germán Rey.

The event concluded with the presentation of the book La búsqueda de la calidad periodística y la transformación del periodismo profesional, ("The search for journalistic quality and the transformation of professional journalism") which records the memory of a seminar held by FNPI and CAF in August 2004 in Monterrey, Mexico.