Venezuela: Ryszard Kapuscinski at the CAF

Ryszard Kapuscinski launches New Journalism series in Caracas.

The celebrated Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski will present in Caracas his book Los cinco sentido del periodista (The five senses of the journalist) to inaugurate the New Journalism Series, a joint project of the Ibero-American New Journalism Foundation (FNPI) of Cartagena, Colombia, and the economic publisher Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE) of Mexico. The launch will take place on Wednesday April 28, 2004 at 7:00 pm in the CAF auditorium, Avenida Luis Roche, Torre CAF, Altamira. Admission is free of charge but the space is limited.

Kapuscinski is visiting Venezuela at the invitation of the FNPI and the CAF to give a journalism workshop on narrative journalism for 16 journalists from media in various Latin American countries.

The FNPI was created in 1994 by writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, to train young reporters and raise the quality of journalism in the region. Foundation Director Jaime Abello Banfi will present the series jointly with Kapuscinski. The FCE, based in Mexico, is the largest publishing firm in Latin America, with almost 70 years presence in the Spanish-speaking world.

CAF Executive President Enrique García said that the international financial institution, jointly with the FNPI, is sponsoring this type of workshop to encourage dialogue and exchange of experiences between social communicators in an effort to develop a journalism based on quality, ethics, responsibility and independence.

In an exclusive to the book launch, the New Journalism Series is publishing, in a non-commercial edition, the book Los cinco sentidos del periodista, which collects the ideas and reflections of the celebrated Polish reporter in the workshops he has given at the request of the FNPI in the headquarters of the Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires in October 2002, and in Mexico City in February 2001.

In his prologue to the book, writer and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, publishing director of the series and senior adviser to the FNPI, describes the reasons for the initiative:

"One year ago, we made the point that the Foundation’s initial mission could be irradiated by making books available to journalists who had not attended the workshops and to general readers interested in the complex fabric of talent, risk, investigation and conscience that moves behind the writing of the most simple news item. The plan of a series of books developed into four series: the Workshop Books, the Essays, the Anthologies and the Dialogues, which will appear at the rate of four to five a year, thanks to the hospitality and the community of intellectual interests that unite the Foundation with Fondo de Cultura Económica."

"In this first volume of the Workshop Books, available free of charge, one of the great journalists of the last half century, Kapuscinski, concentrates in a few pages the wisdom of a profession that in him is intermingled with life itself. These same purposes and passions will be the common stamp – we are sure - of all the books in the series."