What died on Monday (28) at 74, signed a column in during the period in which he directed the river branch and also
Beraba joined Sheet as a reporter for the branch of the. In almost three decades in the newspaper, he was a reporter, director of the Rio de Janeiro branch, policy editor, as well as secretary of writing, ombudsman and special reporter.
Utopia urbana
Rio de Janeiro – I was last week, the capital of Tocantins, which has just turned 12. A child. It is impossible not to stop looking at that part of Brazil, which is about to be built, without thinking about the rest of the poorly built country.
So many years of almost daily coexistence with irrationalities and public mischief, sharpening skepticism. It’s hard to be a journalist without any dose of skepticism. The country we live in reinforces this anguish. Impossible not to question. And, knowing and watching clapping, I was downloaded ever when I come across any public project, especially the megas.
The city has no traffic jams or slums. The rates of violence are small, even now with the PM strike. But the city grows nonstop. Five years ago, there were 86 thousand inhabitants. Now it’s almost 140,000. According to IBGE, an annual growth of 12%.
Is there time and political will to provide the city of basic sanitation, housing policy, civilized urban rules? Or in ten years will we see a mini -rustition from Brasilia, with the pilot plan degraded by the irrational growth of the city and its surroundings?
The optimism of the Palmenses is contagious. Foreigners, Pathfinders, “Dry Oreias” (as pioneer pedestrians call), everyone is building a new city, a new country, a new life from the assumptions of urban planning, sustained growth, equal opportunities.
But the doubts proceed. Is Palmas the last city of the last millennium or is it the new city of the new millennium? Is it the last example of an irrationality cycle that is completed or is the first case of a new cycle that begins? The city, which is intended to be national capital of environmental preservation, is facing its destination.
Credibility and transparency
The 26th Annual Conference of Ono (Ombudsmans of News Organization) and the Forum Sheet Journalism, held over the past week in São Paulo, revolved around a point that today should be the main concern of journalists and the media: credibility.
Several research and analyzes have been presented that the journalistic industry has reasons to restrict. Even in countries such as Brazil, where confidence rates in the media are ups (Ibope/Opinion, May 2005) and the press enjoys more prestige than governments (BBC/Reuters/Media Center Poll, May 2006), the relationship between an increasingly demanding audience and companies involved in a major market dispute is tense.
There has been much criticism of journalism that is being done in various parts of the world. Boring, boring, sensational, superficial, defrauded, distant from people’s interests, poorly determined, entertainment and celebrities, commercial, irresponsible, decontextualized – the list of negative adjectives is immense. It is curious that often what for some is virtue, for others it is defective.
Journalist Andres Oppenheimer, from Miami Herald and a specialist in Latin America, was the most striking in the critic of newspapers. In his opinion, the diaries lose readers because they cannot serve them: they are repetitive, predictable and arrive with aged news. “The newspapers [como são feitos hoje] They are dying, they are on their way to death. “He thinks that, in order to face the speed of circulation of information, they should be more analytical, more investigative and have a more rigorous control of what they edit to be more reliable than” the flood of information “that drown us.
There is no consensus on the future of journalism, but ombudsmans agree on the need for the means to get closer to their audiences and become more transparent. Transparency, in this case, means accounting, making clear the values they advocate, the economic and political interests to which their business groups are associated, their internal working methods, their sources of revenue, their economic performance and the resources they have to improve the quality of the product they offer.
Germán Rey, a researcher and ex-dombudsman at El Tiempo, in Bogota, drew attention, talking about the Latin American press, to the inconsistency of the means that charge the accountability of governments and demand ethical behavior of politicians, companies and people, but who do not have to be accountable, do not submit to the same scrutinies that impose or respect the same amounts they charge.
The means want to watch over politics, Rey commented, but they don’t let them go. The question, of course, is not to fail to oversee, but to be consistent with the principles they elected.
The transparency initiative that impressed me most was that of the British diary The Guardian. According to his ombudsman, Ian Mayes, president of Ono, the newspaper has hired a company to make a social audit that investigated from items such as the staffing policy to the origin of the paper that the newspaper buys (to know if it is manufactured by companies that cause environmental problems). The audit revealed, for example, that the newspaper did not always pay its creditors up to date. It is the suggestion.
