The journalist who takes over the job on Tuesday supports a product with fewer topics and more analysis; he sees coverage of the death of Isabella Nardoni showing that the media bring out the worst in human nature
Newspapers need to find their new role, says ombudsman
Folhas new ombudsman, Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, believes that Brazilian newspapers are going through a contradictory period. On the good side, they are not suffering from the crisis of credibility that is assailing U.S. newspapers. On the bad side, they are losing their power to influence public opinion. He believes that now is the time for newspapers to decide the role they will have in the competition with other media, such as the Internet, radio and TV. He maintains that the future will see a more focused product, with fewer topics and be more analytical.
Lins da Silva will begin to assist readers and write an internal critique next Tuesday, April 22. His first Sunday column will be published April 27 in the national news section. In the interview below, he speaks about the proliferation of blogs, coverage of the Isabella story and the impasse which culminated in his predecessors mandate not being renewed.
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FOLHA Brazilian and American newspapers are going through opposite situations. There, they are losing circulation and advertising income. Here, sales and the volume of advertising are growing. What is the reason for this separation?
CARLOS EDUARDO LINS DA SILVA What is happening in Brazil is illusory, and I believe that Brazilian journalists should not delude themselves with the way things are right now. First, because the Internet is not as widely disseminated here as in the United States. Second, we are experiencing an economic boom which I believe is fleeting. In the United States, to the contrary, the Internet is nearly universal and the economy is starting to suffer the first stumbles. In my opinion, the trend for print newspapers to lose circulation is irreversible.
FOLHA Is it the Internet that will take this public away from newspapers?
LINS DA SILVA I believe that the Internet is already taking the public and advertising away from newspapers. And it will be this way if print newspapers do not revive their existence.
FOLHA Dont you believe that the number of print newspaper readers could grow as more people become literate and have more money to spend? In the United States, in the 60s, 800f Americans 18 years or older read newspapers during the week. Now it is still about 50%. Brazil never even came close to that.
LINS DA SILVA The problem is that in Brazil, growth of news media was squashed. In the United States, the development of capitalism was more or less orderly. There was monetary affluence, which reached a large part of the population. There was the victory of worker rights, which guaranteed more leisure time. There was universal literacy. All of this led to nearly everyone reading newspapers. After this, television arose, then the Internet. In Brazil, there was no homogenous distribution of wealth, there are still many illiterate people, and you have, before reading newspapers became universal, the arrival of television and the Internet. Therefore, I believe that universalization will never occur.
FOLHA Facing the loss of circulation, some American newspapers are betting on hyper-locality. They focus increasingly on their own community. Will this be a trend in Brazil?
LINS DA SILVA I dont know if this will work even in the United States. There is another difference between American and Brazilian newspapers, which is the question of credibility. There, they are going through a period of loss of credibility. Here we are not. But coming back to the question, I dont know if this is a solution for print newspapers. Because the Internet is also the most suitable medium for providing local information. You can buy your movie ticket by Internet. You can find out the menu of a restaurant by Internet. There is no way to provide this kind of service on the pages of a newspaper.
For me, the recourse for print newspapers is to bet on depth, quality, having more focus and dealing with fewer topics. Because this is something that the Internet cant offer. Print newspapers need to seek the type of content which they do best instead of insisting on competing with the Internet on what it can offer more conveniently to readers.
FOLHA Some English newspapers are trying this more focused and deeper model, but they are not getting more readers this way.
LINS DA SILVA I think it is natural that this model which I support will have fewer readers than the current model. Because this new newspaper will not have to attend to the whole range of possible readers. It should be directed at a more specific portion of the population. It could have less circulation, but it will spend less on paper and it could have more advertising, focused on that public. And more important, it could have more social influence than this newspaper directed at the general public, which is very expensive to produce.
FOLHA From the point of view of quality of information, forgetting circulation and advertising, do you believe that Brazilian newspapers are going through a good or bad period?
LINS DA SILVA I believe they are going through a good period, as long as they dont lose credibility, as happened in the United States. On the other side, I believe that Brazilian newspapers lost the power to influence. The best example was the presidential election of 2006. It was clear that most newspapers would have preferred that Lula (President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva) not win. Nevertheless, Lula got two-thirds of the votes. In the same way, at the time of the allowance bribery scandal, most of Brazils highest-quality newspapers preferred that the outcome be different.
FOLHA What is the big challenge for print newspapers today?
LINS DA SILVA It is to define what role they will play. Mainly to maintain influence. Newspapers will have to find their place, as radio did. Many said that radio would die with the arrival of television. But thats not what happened. Today things are great for radio. It discovered that its place was no longer to be like the National Radio network was in the middle of the last century: the center of the familys attention during the evening prime time. It lost audience. At the time, 80 0stened to National Radio. Now it is 1%. The same thing will happen to print newspapers.
FOLHA The Internet brought more participation by readers. Do you see a future for these experiences that use the reader as provider of content?
LINS DA SILVA I am very skeptical about this. This supposed democratization of the Internet, which allows the citizen to be a reporter, is very demagogic. The public needs information that is checked out rigorously and methodically. Only some people, who have aptitude and experience, manage to do this.
FOLHA This will be an election year in Brazil. With it, the ombudsman should be sought out by political advisers and also by readers who believe that the newspaper is protecting this or that candidate. How do you intend to carry out this supervision of neutrality by the newspaper and, at the same time, separate political passions, or the interests of advisers, from the more objective opinions of readers?
LINS DA SILVA This will be one of my challenges. I believe that the newspaper has the right to endorse a candidate. I dont believe that it must, but it has the right. On the other side, in the news, the newspaper does not have the right to endorse a candidate. It must provide coverage as close as possible to independent. As you know, absolute objectivity does not exist. But something close to it exists, which is to balance the space given to candidates, not to use adjectives, and to give more or less fair focus to the main competing candidates.
I dont much like the word supervision, but the observation which I will carry out will be based on this. There must be balance and the maximum amount of independence possible. It is clear that nobody will ever be satisfied. But the measure of success is always to be attacked by all sides. The more attacks the newspaper receives from all sides, the closer to balance it will be.
FOLHA The Internet also allows the proliferation of blogs, many with a political focus. Do you believe that these blogs have already managed to influence public opinion?
LINS DA SILVA In Brazil, certainly not. In the United States, yes. This influence is being felt in the presidential election. However, I believe it is a bad, pernicious influence. The blogs tend to stir up divisions. For example, I believe that the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is being hurt by the division that the blogs incite, between blacks and whites, between women and men, between blue collar workers and liberal professionals, which is the division that is established in the electoral demographics of Hillary and Obama.
In Brazil, it is similar, but it is much smaller because a small number of people have access to the Internet and read these blogs. But it creates uneasiness because of the radicalism by some of them, which dont debate, they offend. They descend to a level that cant even be called debate. And this contaminates those who form public opinion, who often read these blogs and end up being contaminated by radicalism, creating artificial situations.
The race between members of the (left-learning) governing Workers Party (PT) and (centrist) Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) is very artificial because there are not many things that distance one party from the other. But it is damaged by people who read and even participate in these blogs and divide themselves in a very odious way.
FOLHA The previous ombudsman, Mrio Magalhes, conditioned his continuation in the position on the newspaper reversing its decision made last year to no longer publish on the Internet its internal critique, which, in the understanding of the editors, was being used by competitors and manipulated by journalists tied to the presidential palace. Do you believe that the critique should be public?
LINS DA SILVA From the point of view of the ombudsman, I believe this question is irrelevant. From the point of view of the newspaper, innocuous. Irrelevant because anything important in the internal critique could be in the Sunday column, which is public. The reader, then, loses nothing. For the newspaper, I believe that the measure is innocuous because the fact of being restricted to the newsroom will not keep competitors and political groups from getting access to it. It is impossible to prevent something that is distributed to more than 100 journalists from not leaking outside the newspaper. I believe that the impasse was caused by a matter that did not need to be provoked, either by one side or the other. I really regret this because I believe that Mrio was doing such a good job as ombudsman, and this benefited readers and the newspaper.
FOLHA The most recent ombudsmen focused their Sunday columns on Folhas coverage. Will you do the same or do you intend to perform a wider analysis of all the media?
LINS DA SILVA I wont deal in the Sunday column with any other specific news organization because I dont have the mandate for this. My commitment is to Folha and I wont be an ombudsman for competitors, television or the Internet. But, occasionally, I could deal with the media in general because I believe that it will be interesting for readers.
FOLHA You assume the job of ombudsman on Tuesday, but you have always been an attentive reader. What irritates you most about newspapers?
LINS DA SILVA What irritates me most is superficiality. After that, mistakes in Portuguese. And this is silliness, pedantry on my part, because mistakes in Portuguese are not that important. In third place, fabrications really irritate me. The attempt to call attention with what a reporter thinks is funny. For example, starting a story with a joke which only makes me lose a few seconds on something that makes no sense. Opinions that are very labored, which add nothing for the reader, also irritate me.
FOLHA How do you evaluate the work of the news media in the coverage of the Isabella case? (Isabella Nardoni, 5, was strangled and thrown from her family’s sixth-floor apartment in So Paulo; her father and stepmother have been arrested as suspects in her death).
LINS DA SILVA I believe that newspapers are worried about not repeating mistakes, as occurred in the coverage of other police cases that mobilized public opinion. That is very positive. There is concern about ethical aspects. But I believe what (Folha columnist) Clvis Rossi calls scenes of explicit journalism to be absurd. I saw the departure from jail of the suspect couple and could not make any sense of the battalion of cameramen on motorcycles putting the TV cameras against the windows of the car in which they (the suspects) were riding. I dont know the informative value that an image of that type could have.
I dont know if this is avoidable because the public seems to want this type of coverage. The media, at these times, end up stimulating the worst in human nature, about morbidity and sick curiosity.
But here is a question. Does serious journalism need to give the public what it wants, or says it wants? In my opinion, serious journalism must meet public demand, but it also must lead. It is necessary to have an exchange between the news organization and its consumer for the newspaper to satisfy the desires of readers, but it also helps to improve the quality of those desires.
– Translation by John Wright
