RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A survey conducted by Poder360 newspaper with information from Atlas da Notícia shows that 17 medium to large national scope vehicles closed their activities in Brazil between the years 2018 and 2021. This year (2021), five closures were registered – such as the newspaper El País, which announced its end on December 14.
In a letter addressed to readers, El País communicated that it had not reached economic sustainability, despite its audience and many subscribers.
In addition to the Spanish newspaper, which only had a digital version in Brazil, other press outlets closed this year due to corporate restructuring that bet on digital. Among them are Agora newspaper, the Folha Group, and Época magazine, from the Globo Group.
Effect of the big techs
The president of ANJ (National Association of Journalists), Marcelo Rech, said in an interview with Poder360 that the main reason for the closing down of news companies is the “duopoly” formed by Google and Facebook, the second one managed by the Meta group.
According to him, the two companies “swallow” the world’s advertising budgets.
For Rech, the “world crisis of journalism” is due to the economic model that favors the duopoly that “sells and shows advertising simultaneously”.
He also explains that if there is no model of remuneration of journalistic activities by the big techs in question, the erosion of journalism will be “gradual”, with the closing of vehicles and difficulties for the creation of new initiatives.
Among the consequences of the “disappearance of journalism” cited by Rech is the election of authoritarian, autocratic, and populist governments and misinformation and hate speech growth.
As for the closing of El País, the journalist classified the situation as a “perfect storm.”
“There is an economic model that does not stop standing and, at the same time, there is an instrumentalization of attacks on journalism,” he said.
In agreement with Rech, the president of Abraji (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism), Natália Mazotte, said that “the closing of news vehicles has been a trend for more than a decade in several countries, not only in Brazil.”
“Businesses based on information suffered a huge disruption with the emergence of digital media. Newspapers and magazines had a monopoly on the distribution of information and delivered a package of services that went beyond the news. Now they no longer have this monopoly, and the services that used to be embedded in the newspaper, such as, for example, the classified ads, started to be offered in new media”, he told Poder360.
Mazotte also analyzed that he does not evaluate a causal relationship between fake news and the closing of media outlets.
“I believe that the closing of news vehicles contributes to a less healthy information ecosystem, considering that it is a reliable source of information that disappears,” he said.