Between Us: What's The News?

Here's most of an ad that's been running stateside:

"The News, an English language daily based in Mexico City is relaunching
this year. We are looking for editors and reporters to join us in this
exciting new venture. Editors need a minimum of five years experience,
reporters at least three years. Knowledge and interest in Mexico is a
decided advantage. Fluency in Spanish is preferred. InDesign knowledge a
plus."

People involved with this "exciting new venture" (or who want to be involved) have been effecting a self-important secrecy about the project, as though it were the local equivalent of the Manhattan Project. So there's a lot of unconfirmed hearsay floating around. But the ad tells us a few things:

1. There will be an English-language daily in Mexico sometime this year, barring a last-minute pullout.

2. It will be a re-incarnation of The News, the bland tabloid that the O'Farrill family published for more than 50 years through 2002.

3. Management is recruiting outside the country, asking for more experienced journalists than the old News usually hired.

4. Management considers knowledge of Mexico to be an "advantage" rather than a necessity, and Spanish fluency is "preferred" rather than required.

5. Whoever writes their ads needs some work on hyphen and comma use, as well as noun-verb number agreement.

We don't know yet whether the new News will be like the old News. That will depend on the publication's approach to some variables. Such as:

Independence: A conservative slant is the prerogative of the publisher and isn't necessarily a quality-killer. But the old News was so compromised by its pro-government bias that its credibility was close to non-existent.

Quality: There's no polite way to put it — the old News was a porquería, a very amateurish endeavor. Gross mistakes were common, and a lot of the locally produced copy made very little sense. Will the new News give us what we deserve?

Professionalism: Experienced journalists rarely worked at the old News, unless their experience was entirely at the News itself. The career journalists who slipped in were watched closely as potential troublemakers, and prevented from having an impact on the product itself.

Mission: Since the paper will surely not have a staff large enough to cover "all" the news, it should decide what it will focus on. If it does, it will be a rarity among such publications here. That's because most English-language efforts have chosen -- or been forced — to fill up their pages with whatever they could get their hands on. They’ve had no journalistic purpose other than to be in English.

(An exception is the monthly Inside Mexico, which knows exactly what it wants to do: serve as a sort of house organ for the English-language "community" by emphasizing service articles and people pieces. They do a pretty good job, but that approach isn't substantive enough for a daily newspaper.)

The old News had no criteria for what to put in the paper, but lots for what to leave out — controversy, opposition viewpoints, intelligent comment. Which leads us to the final variable:

Intelligence level: For some reason, there's an assumption among media heavies that English speakers, because they are less well-versed about Mexican society, need to read at the level of six-year-olds. Newspapers by definition are published for the common reader, but the common Anglophone reader in Mexico is not necessarily the boob that these publishers think.

The leader in this department is not a written publication but the radio program Living in Mexico. I'm an admirer of Ana María Salazar and I'm glad there's a news and commentary program available in English. But I'm telling you, the show is so dumbed down I feel like I'm listening to Barney the Dinosaur.

The Herald Mexico was far from perfect in this regard, especially in the entertainment and culture section, but it condescended considerably less than its predecessors. So maybe things are moving in the right direction. Will the new News treats us like intelligent, curious adults?

Or perhaps more to the point, will it be capable of doing that?

You can ask them yourself. The contact address is: publicrelations@thenews.com.mx

Let me know if you get an answer.