The study, Inflection Point, by SembraMedia in partnership with Omidyar Network, offers many clues to achieving the elusive goal of sustainability for new digital media.
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Extensive interviews with the founders -- 25 each from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico -- produced data that clarified the elements of successful business models and showed the best places to invest resources and training.
"This finding suggests that women are taking advantage of the low barriers to entry in digital media startups to go around the glass ceilings of traditional media and build their own publishing companies," wrote the directors of the study, Janine Warner and Mijal Iastebner, who are also co-founders of SembraMedia. (Disclosure: I worked as an editor of the study.)
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The findings are remarkable, given the male dominance of ownership and management in traditional media in Latin America. "We believe this finding about the relatively high number of women in leadership roles in digital media in Latin America is significant and warrants further study," the authors wrote.
In a 2014 study of Mexican media ownership, Aimée Vega Montiel of the Universidad Autónoma of Mexico found that less than 1% of television station owners were women and none of the country’s newspapers included a woman owner. Among her other findings:
- Directors. There was not one woman among the 52 board members of Grupo Televisa and Televisión Azteca, the two dominant television groups, nor among two other prominent TV groups.
- In radio, women had 8% of the board seats, and in newspapers, 11%.
- Executives. In television, no women had any senior executive positions—not in administration, finance, or editorial. In radio, they had 11% of these strategic positions and in print media 13% (2014, pp. 198-205).
Vega Montiel observed that women’s lack of access to positions of authority in the media in
Mexico “leaves them marginalized in one of the most important sectors of global capitalism: the
cultural industries” (p. 205). (Read full study in PDF.)
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the situation is similar in most other Latin American countries.
Sucess stories defy the trends
- Economía Femini(s)ta of Argentina, founded by two economists, Mercedes D’Alessandro and Magalí Brosio, has produced articles that have attracted attention in international media, in particular a study of salary inequality titled, “Women earn less than men around the planet, and your mom, too.” The country's Ministry of Economy has included the publication's articles on its website.
- Aristegui Noticias of Mexico, founded and directed by Carmen Aristegui, was part of the original reporting team on the Panama Papers investigation that won the Pulitzer Prize. In addition, Aristegui's investigative team revealed that President Enrique Peña Nieto’s wife had bought a $7 million home in Mexico City with a loan from a company whose owner had received millions in contracts from Peña Nieto during his time as governor of the state of Mexico.
- Juanita León, co-founder and publisher of La Silla Vacía, and her team won the prestigious García Márquez journalism prize in 2016 for their coverage of the peace process in Colombia. She and her team have been leaders in data visualization, such as their section on the Super Powerful of Colombia.
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