Rio de Janeiro.
My own keynote presentation started the second day of SBPJor. Powerpoint and audio are below; the full paper (which attacks the topic from a slightly different angle, but makes much the same points) is also online.

My sincere thanks to Carlos Franciscato and the SBPJor organisation for the invitation to speak at the conference; it’s been great to meet some of the many Brazilian journalism researchers whose work I’ve been aware of for some time now. I’m sorry that because of the language barrier I’ve not been able to participate more fully in the conference itself …

Rio de Janeiro.
The next keynote speaker at SBPJor is Marcos Palacios (whose speech I hear in live translation, so we’ll see how this liveblog goes…). Marcos suggests that there are hurrahs as well as uh-ohs in the transformation of journalism for the digital media environment: in the first place, as we venture into a digital environment, we learn that media have memory – that there are more uses for yesterday’s newspaper than to wrap today’s fish.

News has been called the first draft of history, of course – journalism has an input into both historiography, and into the formation …

Rio de Janeiro.
As part of my last overseas trip for this year, I’ve made it to Brazil for SBPJor, the conference of Brazilian journalism researchers – which opens with a keynote by John Pavlik. (My own plenary presentation follows tomorrow morning.) John’s focus is on the consequences of digital journalism for democracy: chief amongst these, disruption and innovation in the journalism industry; the emergence of a digital divide between those with and without access; the development of more robust interactive media; greater transparency in government; and increased civic participation.

Disruption and innovation is driven by greater access to …