SAP Global Survey: Argentina's Ignacio Escribano

   

           [Argentina's Ignacio Escribano. Photo by Shel]

The term "Renaissance Man" is most often used to describe Leonardo Da Vinci, because of his contributions to multiple disciplines including art, science and philosophy. Certainly, Argentina's Ignacio Escribano, who heads the citizen journalism project for La Nación, Argentina's national newspaper has not equaled Leonardo's. But his has been a diverse path that shows a restless interest and contributions in as many categories.

Trained as a doctor of internal medicine in 1995 and planned to be a psychiatrist, a lucrative field since there seems to be a huge demand for Argentinean shrinks. Before returning to school,however, he went on a backpacking bicycle vacation to Patagonia. "There I knew my destiny was something different than being in a hospital.

Ignacio decided to become a freelance journalist instead. He contributed to several prestige publications including the Spanish language version of the Miami Herald as well as La Nación.  In 2003, he wrote a piece for La Nación , observing the irony of two statues in front of Argentina's argest public library. One was of Evita Peron, who once said: "Shoes yes. Books. no." The other statue was of Pope John Paul II, then head of the religion followed by most Argentineans.

The editors spiked his story. Frustrated, he stopped writing, taking a scholarship to Cambridge University where he studied Buddhism and Hinduism for six months. Curious what life was like in countries, where the culture was not dominated by Catholicism, he spent the next 18 months living as a house guest with people he met in Germany, Sweden and England. He found more free thinking in these cultures than in Argentina and the experience and his dedication to spirituality shaped his future.

Eventually returning to Argentina to meet up with his Indian guru who advised him to become a recording artist, he started singing Latin music and playing guitar with prominent local musicians.  They cut an album which is selling well but not well enough to pay the rent in Ignacio's apartment.

At about that time, he met up with Guido Grinbaum, but we'll get to him in a moment. Bear with me through this aside.

Until now, I have been publishing the SAP Global Survey in a straightforward Q&A format, conducting all previous interviews by email. To my pleasant surprise, respondents keep changing how they've responded. Ignacio became the first to decline an email conversation, saying his English was not good enough, which is untrue. He added that face-to-face and phone interviews, such as we've now conducted were more human, which is entirely true. Of course, this way, I have to work harder.  In the end, our four hours of conversation has built a friendship that promises to endure and makes the effort worth the investment and then some.

Now back to our story...

With about 40 million people, Argentina is among the world's 10 largest countries. It is also geographically among the longest. From it's northern border to its southernmost point is a distance equal to the distance between Moscow and Madrid. One-third of the population lives in Buenos Aires. Ignacio is among them.

There is a significant, and growing middle class, but from one-third to half of the population exists below the poverty line. Broadband in home and office is growing but relatively slowly, even among middle class people who already have installed TV cables. Home connection is over $100 monthly and is significantly slower than in the US.

Argentineans, for the most part, use "Locutorios," for connection. These are former phone call centers that have evolved into computer cafes where people can connect at an affordable hourly rate. This is very similar to what I have witnessed in both Ireland and Italy and I imagine is pretty common worldwide. Locutorias are pretty much ubiquitous, at least in Buenos Aires. People use computers there for email, downloads, research, chat, printing and game playing.

Bubbleshare and Flickr are both popular photo sites, but music and video downloads are less popular. Many people fear downloads will deliver viruses, so they still buy music CDs, which they consider safer.

In July 2006, Ignacio met the aforementioned Guido Grinbaum,founder of Deremate.com , which is sort of the South American eBay. When La Nacion corporate, whose primary property is the newspaper Ignacio that motivated Ignacio to leage Argentina in anger three years earlier, bought the auction site, Guido was put in charge of all digital operations. Guido invited Ignacio to run a new citizen journalism and social media site to be called Igooh. The word loosely translates to mean "transform from the darkness." 

Two months later, Igooh was born on the first day of South American spring. Ignacio picked the day for symbolic reasons. He remembered at quote that he had seen in 1995 or so when he was was a hospital volunteer in Boston: “All the flowers may be cut, but spring cannot be stopped.” 

If there was some cutting to be done, it would come from his former colleagues on the traditional journalism side  of La Nación where blogging and social media are disdained to say the least.  The online  version of the newspaper stopped allowing comments on the request of the journalists. This is not as odd as it may sound, says Ignacio. "I play music for the musicians in the room," he told me. "Our journalists write for their bosses and for their fellow journalists, not for the people. So they don't want to hear from the people."

Ignacio's former colleagues do not take Citizen Journalism sites like Igooh seriously. Now that it is receiving about 180,000 unique visitors monthly, such disdain may subside. Except for a recent and mysterious plateau, readership has steadily risen in the year since its inception. By contrast, La Nacion has remained steady at about 175,000 daily readers over the past year.

Igooh posts about 40 articles every day, written mostly by middle class Argentinians between the ages of 30 and 40. They write mostly about politics and current events. People share personal--often intimate--stories and occasionally post a poem or song.  There are some photos, but mostly it is text posting. Video and audio clips have not yet arrived.

Ignacio is the designated face of Igooh. "If people see me do it and I am comfortable, it invites them to do the same." He is Igooh's most frequent contributor, rebutting editorials he disagrees with, posting photo essays and personal interviews.  He writes only in  a first-person voice and he is often quite intimate in what he has to say.

He sees key differences between citizen and traditional journalism.  Ignacio has faith in people replacing editors as fact checkers. There is no place at Igooh for the backroom politics that motivated Ignacio to quit contributing to La Nacion in 2003. He prefers the voices of everyday people to the more polished tonality of the pros because he hears the ring of truth in them.

Like most of the world's sites, Google directs the most traffic to Igooh, sending it 70 % of total readership. Only five percent come from banner ads at the regular La Nación site. Igooh doesn't know much about its own demographics.  It has yet to install Google Analytics or similar services. It's charter is to provide a social network as well as citizen journalism, but that part has not yet started.

Ignacio believes that social media's ability to let any person publish and any voice to be heard represents the most important social revolution since Gutenberg, " but revolutions take time," he told me, "perhaps decades."

In fact, my conversations with Ignacio have demonstrated that revolutions move at different paces in different places. No US journalist laughs at or disdains the impact of social media. There are no traditional media companies dismissing what's happening on line as a passing adolescent fad anymore. When I met Ignacio and Eduardo Lomanto, a business executive for La Nacion, back in July, they were both shocked, when I said that I doubted there would be many metropolitan dailies printing papers five years from today and many would simply be out of business. Their mouths opened in harmony when I said many people doubted that either the Boston Globe or San Francisco Chronicle could survive through 2007.

In the US, my observation has been heard many times and no one considers such statements surprising. In Argentina, the concept of a world where trees are not cut down and smeared with ink then distributed by machines that burn gas is still astounding and futuristic.

"In Argentina, we are about five years behind the US," Eduardo told me. "That's why we are here--to talk with people like you so that we can understand or own future."

My free-for-what-it's-worth advice to Latin American and for that matter European media companies is to pay very close attention to what is happening to traditional US media companies. My advice in countries accustomed to monolithic top-down information controls is to heed the words of Bob Dylan.

The times they are a'changing and they are changing faster than you may realize.

Comments

[Alex]

Fascinating interview, Shel, thanks for sharing. I'll be sure to include Igooh among the case studies in my Social Media class at UM.

[mariano]

Shel, are you in Argentina?

[shel israel]

Mariano,

I am in Silicon Valley. I met Ignacio when he was here, then we talked by phone. Sorry if I did not make that clear.