Faster by the second

How fast in the news business changing? Consider these links I ran across just this morning.

Me and my mic: Kevin Sites is the ultimate backpacker journalist. Toting his gear from war zone to disaster area to border conflict, uploading video via cameraphone and talking to people on the ground, he's a walking one-man TV crew.

Follow your nose: A site now allows you to paw through headlines in a spider web fashion, rather than plain-old news columns up and down. Fascinating and time-wasting, but still fascinating. A thesaurus version of this idea has been around for a while.

Citizen journalists: That's what CNN calls them, those people who get video of plane crashes and hurricanes blowing through, then send in the tape. Increasingly, the video is just turning up online, randomly.

Citizen editors: Esquire let people edit a story on the Wikipedia site, which hundreds and hundreds did. Why write a letter to the editor? Edit the damn thing yourself.

Long lead times?

Don't hand me that. A good reporter sees the big story coming and reports it, no matter how long our publishing delay might be.

The New York Times had a nice story today, well-reported, about how Pemex needs to spend now or face the music when the Cantarell oilfield dies. Given how much of Mexico's public budget is based on Pemex making money, that's a big deal.

Mexico City Correspondent Marisol Rueda is all over Pemex in our July issue, including statements from Pemex head Luiz Ramírez Corzo and quotes from ExxonMobil and Petrobras on the issue of future deals. Great, industrial-strength reporting makes news happen.

Great work, Marisol!

September is out!

Lots of good copy in September to talk about, first and foremost the temporary return of longtime correspondent Joshua Goodman (stateside now) to our pages with a great example of how to turn the big national story into a Latin Trade piece. Barrick's plans to tear up a glacier for the gold underneath is not news in BA and probably not in Chile, either, but Josh puts a great analytic spin on it by talking to the right people: The mine, of course, but also environmentalists against the plan, mining investment experts and nationals on the ground.

Departed intern Rachel Hatzipanagos, now studying in her third year at the University of Central Florida, found a nice trend story in the so-called BRIC economies: Brazil, India, Russia, China. Not so much that there is such a thing, but that companies are starting to talk about them as a coherent sales geography. An academic idea is becoming a market reality, and sourcing here makes the difference. It's not professors jabbering about what might be, but real companies making plans now for what will be.

Ecuador Correspondent Marí­a Elena Verdezoto nails a great regional trend from Quito: the rise of the three-stars. Latin American business travelers have long had to content themselves with five stars or nothing, which might be fun for the exec but is bad news for medium-sized companies trying to grow. French chain Accor saw demand, and Ma. Elena saw a story. Good work!

News Editor Forrest Jones is quickly becoming king of the one-off interview that spins into a great story later. Traveling in Mexico he lucked into a chat with a little drug company. Turns out they have a cheap, reliable antidote for scorpion stings, while across the border in the United States it takes thousands of dollars of intensive care to sort out what could have been a one-dose, go home situation. (Which begins to explain the ridiculous cost of health care in the United States.) Jones got this on the fly while traveling, then tracked his other sources down on the phone in Miami. He did something similar last year, talking with Brazilian digital-projector sellers. Moral: Great stories are everywhere, if you can see them.

Finally, Ricardo Castillo nails the coming Central America story by providing a great, source-laden review of the moves by big foreign banks in the last large, coherent market left in the region. The key here was to get bankers talking, and he does. An excellent snapshot of a five-country market that slights none and captures the moves of the biggest dollars so far.

Baby Katerina

Congratulations to Lima Correspondent Lisa Wing, who delivered a healthy, 8.1 lb (3.675 kg) baby girl on Saturday, August 27 at noon. Her name is Katerina.

Lisa says she's exhausted but thrilled, as is husband Mark.

Pending payments

If you did work published in any edition in May or June 2005 (or earlier) and have not been paid, please let me know as soon as you can the following and, really, only the following:

1) slug (such as "fe mac0505")

and

2) your invoice number

Send me this data in an e-mail to me and only me at gbrown@latintrade.com and put the word

pago

in the subject line please.

If you did work published in July or later, please bear in mind that your checks will be cut and sent 75 days after publication. The first July payments will be en route by Sept. 15. Thanks for your patience.