Valencia’s newspaper El Carabobeño could be the newest victim of what I call as”Newsprint-geddon”, the ongoing (and quite deliberate) shortage of newsprint for publishing. The paper informed their readers on Sunday that their reserves consist of only enough print for nine days and that they have requested the CEAM (the State’s company in charge on selling…
After a long battle, the central government can finally say they took down the real mastermind behind the evil “parallel dolar”: DolarToday’s mobile app. Sure, it couldn’t be done without breaking the Venezuelan internet by blocking all content hosted by Amazon’s S3 cloud service, one of the world’s largest, which hosts literally trillions of pieces of content and…
More than five and a half years ago, the Venezuelan telecoms regulatory agency (CONATEL) ordered the shutdown of 32 radio stations, including five belonging to the private network CNB (Circuito Nacional Belfort). Those CNB stations eventually became part of the State Media System (the main one in Caracas is now ANRadio, the National Assembly’s FM). All…
Since the efforts of lobbyists and PSFs are not yielding positive results lately, the central government has decided to take a new direct approach in the “media war”: the Vice-Ministry of International Communication, under control of the Communication & Information Ministry (MinCI). The mission of this new Vice-Ministry will be to not only present the government’s side…
After 15 years, Caracas newspaper TalCual will stop publishing its daily edition on February 27th. In a written statement, the paper confirmed the bad news (leaked earlier by some of its columnists) but insists that they’ll try to continue as a weekly publication and through its website. But the statement also leaves clear who they…
After days of rumours, it was finally confirmed that Notitarde, one of Valencia’s main newspapers (the other one being El Carabobeño) was sold by its largest shareholder Ricardo Degwitz to Spanish businessman José Rodríguez Álvarez, the owner of the Hesperia WTC Hotel, one of the biggest in the city. Degwitz made the announcement to the…
Over the weekend, there was a massive outage of the Internet by the State-owned company CANTV, which affected most of the country. Even if CANTV apologized and said that the service had been restored, many customers have complained in the following days. The reasons behind the outage are still unexplained, as it was the largest failure since…
Six months have passed since HegemonCorp. (the private arm of the hegemony) bought El Universal, one of Venezuela’s oldest and largest newspapers. Since then, the paper has turned into a parody of itself, with many of its journalists leaving and with an editorial line so insipid that it makes fully state-owned counterparts like Ciudad CCS seem fully alive in…
This Politico article on Vladimir Putin’s “communicational hegemony” seen from the inside is a must for anyone wishing to understand the century’s modern autocracies. It served to highlight the many weaknesses in chavismo’s version of communicational hegemony. Because, for all its mighty power, there is one thing neither Telesur nor TVes nor VTV have ever…
As a new year dawns, we can all agree that things are looking dour for Venezuela. The economic outlook is ghastly, and the political one is not brighter. It takes enormous energy to will oneself out of a pessimistic mood. And that’s exactly how the government wants it. For many in the opposition’s rank-and-file, everything the…
(The full 5,500-word leaked email in Spanish and English) As teleSUR prepares to launch an English-language satellite station in July 2015 (its 10th anniversary), there is unrest in the Caracas and Quito headquarters. Several high-level employees have been mistreated and/or expelled by the inner circle in Caracas, and disparities in wages, shift schedules and workloads are…
On October 1st, Caracas newspaper Tal Cual announced in an editorial that the paper would run out of newsprint before the end of this month. As the deadline was supposed to end this week, both its workers and what’s left of the media not controlled by the hegemony demanded the central government provide a solution. Last…
Sent: Thursday, 25 September 2014 15:38:02 Subject: Re: the farewell that wasn’t If anyone still doesn’t believe how things are done around here, Telesur contracted a firm to do the website design, and approved a graphic that the firm had casually found on the Internet, and which has already been used for lots of purposes,…
Enviados: Jueves, 25 de Septiembre 2014 15:38:02 Asunto: Re: la despedida que no fue Si alguien sigue sin creer cómo se hacen las cosas, Telesur contrató una empresa para que haga el diseño….se le aprobó algo que simplemente agarraron de internet y que se usa para un montòn de cosas, por ejemplo, en tono azul,…
As Quico wrote, many Venezuelans won’t be aware of yesterday’s stand-off between the authorities and members of a pro-government colectivo unless they saw the events unfold online in real time. No TV station made any attempt to cover it live, and now today’s papers (with few exceptions) will be conditioned by the official description of what…
Caracas Chronicles 