The Day of Good News | Translation

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Translated by MC Editorial

[Daniel Alarcón]: If you listen to Radio Ambulante or El hilo, you probably already know that we’re obsessed with politics—not just in Latin America, but also in the US. This year’s presidential election is not only one of the most crucial in history, but also one of the tightest. There’s a lot at stake, and the outcome will likely come down to just a few states.

This time, over 36 million Latinos are eligible to vote, and to better understand them, we teamed up with our partners at Noticias Telemundo to create a new series: El Péndulo. Join journalist Julio Vaqueiro as he visits five key states: Pennsylvania, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, and North Carolina. Listen to El Péndulo: Voto Latino 2024, a podcast by Noticias Telemundo and Radio Ambulante Studios, available on our Central series channel on iHeart Radio or your favorite podcast platform.

This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

[Dial up]

Depending on your age, you may remember this sound:

[Modem sound]

[Daniel]: Towards the end of the 90s, the Internet was beginning to reach thousands of homes around the world. But in order to browse those first pages, blogs and chats, you had to use a telephone line. And that very particular noise came from the telephone while users connected to the network.

And connecting at that time was expensive. In Brazil, for example, in addition to the time the telephone companies charged for each minute, you had to pay for a connection service, like a membership. 

[Leão Serva]: It was very expensive, and only the rich could get it.

[Daniel]: This is Leão Serva. He has been working as a journalist for about 40 years. He currently lives in London and is the international director of TV Cultura, a Brazilian television channel. He has also worked for several Brazilian newspapers as an editor, director and correspondent.

[Leão]: In the 1990s I worked as a war correspondent in Europe—Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. 

[Daniel]: But at the turn of the millennium, Leão became involved in a different kind of project. One that promised to revolutionize Internet use in Brazil. It was called iG. 

[Leão]: Free Internet. iG. 

[Daniel]: Or “igui”, as they say in Brazil.

iG was to be both a free internet connection service and a portal, meaning that users would no longer need to pay for an internet subscription.

[Leão]: People paid only the phone bill. 

[Daniel]: iG was owned by two telephone companies. So what really mattered to them was that the lines were kept busy. The more interesting the content on the site, the longer people would stay “hooked” on the line, and the more money iG would make.

Leão worked for several months on the development of the project, and the site was officially launched on January 9, 2000. 

[Leão]: And suddenly a million people started using something they had never used before.

[Daniel]: iG quickly became one of the largest portals in Brazil. Its strong point was its news page called “Último segundo”, of which Leão was the director. He recalls that in just one year the team went from 18 to 120 journalists.

[Leão]: We started publishing 1,440 news stories per day, one per minute. And this was a very, very powerful thing. When you looked at the screen, the news kept coming up all the time. You could see incoming fresh news by the minute. 

[Daniel]: About a third of these stories were produced by iG journalists, and the rest were taken from international agencies. This was the only way to ensure such a high volume of publication. While the journalists were working in the editorial office, the heads of the marketing department were thinking about how to attract even more visitors. And one of the ideas they had was to create theme days on the site.

[Leão]: A day to give food to the poor. So we collected food, or a day for this, a day for that. And the most famous one was the day without a gerund.

[Daniel]: The day without a gerund. No iG text would use this grammatical conjugation.

But the most memorable theme day for the journalists in the editorial office was a different one, which came a little later.

It was an idea to try to lighten the mood…

[Leão]: Because Brazil was a bit, eh, going through a strange critical situation—devaluation of the real, price increases in everything. There were a lot of kidnappings; there was, as they say in Brazil, “Um baixo astral generalizado.”

[Daniel]: A general downturn in morale…

That’s why iG’s marketing department thought it was necessary to turn the tense atmosphere around. Change the narrative. Show people that there were also good things happening in Brazil.

[Leão]: So this idea of “Good News Day” came about. “Let’s do a good news day.”

[Daniel]: A day when iG would publish only news items that were considered positive: donations from companies, people who do random acts of goodness, stories of overcoming personal challenges, some positive numbers from the economy or the health system… That kind of thing.

But maintaining that rosy world, even if it was only for 24 hours, was going to be much more difficult than they expected.

We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Brazilian journalists Vitor Hugo Brandalise and Bia Guimarães produced this story.

This is Vitor:

[Vitor Hugo Brandalise]: From the very beginning, Leão thought, the good news day was not a good idea. In fact, he felt the campaign went against the very essence of journalism. He had one phrase engraved in his mind:

[Leão]: “Good news is no news.”

[Vitor]: As we said, Leão had a career as a war correspondent and as an editor in major newspapers. His entire career had been built on bringing important and urgent news to the people. He thought that if a piece of news was good for everyone and didn’t bother anyone, that was a sign that it really wasn’t news. So he tried in every possible way to convince the heads of the marketing department to drop the idea. He spent several weeks delaying the matter until one day one of his bosses came and said: 

[Leão]: “Leão, let’s do it.” And I took that as an order, you know? So, “Okay, let’s do it.”

[Vitor]: There was nothing else to do but to comply. But he agreed to do it on two conditions. The first:

[Leão]: “Give me a month to produce hundreds of good news stories, because in one day there won’t be enough to support the website.” 

[Vitor]: And the second:

[Leão]: “I also want a button the users can click if they want to read bad news as well.” 

[Vitor]: The marketing managers agreed to Leão’s terms. It was August 2001, and Good News Day was scheduled for a month later.

Leão immediately gathered all the journalists in the newsroom to tell them about the project.

[Carina Martins]: Damn it.

[Vitor]: This is Carina Martins, one of the editors of the iG website. Her job was to take care of the front page of the site in the morning, starting at 7 a.m. 

[Carina]: I hated that day since it first began. 

[Vitor]: Carina also hated the idea from the start. And she was not alone. The proposal was not well received by any of the journalists in the newsroom. They all felt the same as Leão: Good news is no news. So now Leão had twice as much work to do. 

[Leão]: Within a month, I had to produce the good news and convince people that it was going to be OK and painless, all of this…

[Vitor]: He quickly got to work on it and appointed a team of about ten reporters to find and produce good news all that month. 

[Leão]: Reports about charities that helped people. A scientific discovery that would do good for people. A good news story about the economy that led to increased pasta production in Milan.

[Vitor]: Carina particularly remembers one of those stories, the one which had taken the most time to produce.

[Carina]: I remember there was a guy who had a big VHS collection and started a film club at his house for the kids in his neighborhood.

[Vitor]: It was about a man with a large collection of movies on VHS cassettes, who held a film club in his house for the neighborhood children.

Journalists spent the whole month looking for this type of news, and they produced around 150 articles. A woman who gave out oranges to street children, a piece of good health statistics, or a company that decided to make donations to charity.

[Leão]: It was going to be a poorer website than other days.

[Vitor]: Because they knew in advance that it would be impossible to maintain the volume of news that iG had on a daily basis depending only on good news. 

[Leão]: It would be a day of “less news, good news.”

[Vitor]: On the evening of September 10, 2001, everything was ready. The Good News Day was to be launched at midnight. Leão left the editorial office for dinner with friends.

[Leão]: I remember that it was exactly 11:45 when a journalist who at this time was a young night editor called me.

And he said, “Leão, there is bad news here. Good News Day is set to start in 15 minutes, and the mayor of Campinas, Toninho, from the PT, was assassinated. What should I do?”

[Vitor]: Campinas is a city of just over a million people. It is an hour from São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil. The mayor of Campinas was Antônio da Costa Santos, who was known to everyone as Toninho do PT. PT is the acronym for the Workers’ Party, one of the largest in Brazil, to which Lula, the current president, belongs. It is a party considered left-wing or center-left, and at that time it was in opposition to the government.

Toninho was standing out in the PT at that time. He was an architect and university professor. He was 49 years old and was in the eighth month of his term.

That day, Toninho left his office at the city hall and went to the gym. Afterwards, he went to a shopping center to pick up a suit he had bought. It was around ten-twenty at night when he was heading home.

As he was driving along an avenue, shots began to ring out. There were three that came from another car. One of the bullets hit Toninho’s aorta. He died instantly.

A promising young Brazilian politician had just been murdered. It was an event of high importance.

As soon as the news broke, local and national media began preparing to cover the case.

[Amauri Soares]: Our first idea was to gather the following day, at the morning news meeting, to visit Campinas as a team, and once there, prepare our São Paulo and online editions, including our lunchtime newscast, Jornal Hoje.

[Vitor]: This is Amauri Soares. He was the journalism director for Globo in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest television network.

When Globo’s journalism chiefs heard about Toninho’s murder, they made a decision: they would bring part of the São Paulo team to Campinas to not only cover the case closely, but also to present the midday newscast, Jornal Hoje, directly from Campinas. 

The murder of Mayor Toninho would be the biggest news story of the next day in the entire country, and perhaps of the entire week or month. Under normal conditions, Leão knew exactly what to do with a story like that. Something very similar to what his colleagues at Globo were planning: special coverage of the case, with the entire main page of the site devoted to articles about the crime.

[Leão]: And suddenly they were wondering, “Hey, is there politics behind the murder?” Right? So it was very important news…

[Vitor]: Toninho was against the big construction companies and real estate speculation. Before becoming mayor, he had denounced alleged fraud in construction projects in Campinas. Were they looking at a crime of revenge? A political assassination? Or had the mayor been just another victim of the wave of violence that was spreading across the country?

Leão was thinking about all this while still on the phone with the night editor who was asking him what to do. The complication, clearly, was that just that night the editorial office was on the countdown to “Good News Day.”

The iG journalists could not believe what was happening.

[Leão]: Outraged, with indignation, everyone thought, “How absurd that we are talking about roses when there is a very serious crime in Campinas,” and all that.

[Vitor]: Leão couldn’t break the rules agreed upon with the marketing team. But he decided to use the second condition he had asked for: the bad news button, which had been placed in a corner, almost hidden in the tenth and last available space on the main page. So on the other end of the phone he said to the journalist:

[Leão]: The last one, the tenth, would be a headline “Má notícia: assassinado ou prefeito de Campinas, Toninho do PT”. This will be a bad news item all day on the homepage, and there will always be on the front page this one link to bad news, right?” “OK, OK.” And we went home to bed.

[Vitor]: It was definitely not what he would have wanted, but in that context it was the only thing he could do.

The next morning, Carina arrived at the iG newsroom to start her 7 a.m. shift and relieve the night editor.

[Carina]: I would log in to load the home page, and I did that alone.

[Vitor]: By that time, all the media were talking about the murder of the mayor of Campinas, and speculations and hypotheses were being woven around the reason for the crime.

Leão’s order had been to go ahead with the Good News Day, although Carina thought it was a very bad idea. The journalists in the newsroom agreed. They approached Carina and told her that they had to cover Toninho’s murder… 

[Carina]: The reporters complained to me, demanding, “You must disobey. From the first minute I received that criticism, like “You’re going to stay the same course.”

[Vitor]: They were saying, “Are we really going to go ahead with the good news?” And yes, they were serious. That had been the order from the marketing team. 

[Carina]: Everyone felt fucking awful, like “Shit, having to go through this day…” It was a day no one was looking forward to.

[Vitor]: Everyone was in a bad mood, there was discomfort, and what they wanted was for that day, which had just begun, to be over already. But, on the contrary, those first morning hours were going by very slowly, too slowly… They had been working on this for a month, and everything was ready. If good news came up during the day that they could cover, great, but in general there was not much work to do. 

[Carina]: It was the opposite of the hard news journalism we did every day, you see?

[Vitor]: It was the opposite of the hard, breaking-news journalism they did every day.

So there were the iG journalists. Chatting, drinking coffee, watching the news on an old television set that was always on in the newsroom… Waiting for the hours to pass, publishing bland, harmless stories. Until, just before 10 in the morning…

[Archive Soundbite]

[Journalist]: You’re watching live images from New York, at the World Trade Center Twin Towers, in the south of the island of Manhattan. The report is that a commercial airplane, whether carrying passengers or cargo is not know yet, has crashed against the towers.

[Vitor]: The image of a plane going through one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

[Carina]: An airplane goes through one of the World Trade Center Twin Towers.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Journalist]: What’s happening? Here it comes, I’m getting behind the car, it’s incredible…

[Vitor]: And, a short while later, one of the most emblematic buildings in New York began to collapse.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Vitor]: They were incredible images; they seemed straight out of a movie. Carina had never seen anything like it. In the middle of the shock, she could think of only one thing:

[Carina]: “What now? We’re screwed. What are we going to do?”

[Vitor]: What now? What are we going to do?

[Carina]: However much we believed that the Good News Day was a bad idea, we would never have imagined how bad.

[Vitor]: The iG journalists never imagined that Good News Day would be SUCH a bad idea. And that they would be SO unlucky as to have it coincide with the already historic day of the attack on the Twin Towers. 

[Daniel]: We’ll be back after a break.

[Daniel]: We’re back with Radio Ambulante. Vitor continues the story.

[Vitor]: In the iG newsroom, everyone was shocked by the news coming from New York. The images that were being broadcast on all the channels in the world were truly shocking. All the journalists’ eyes turned to Carina again. She was in charge of updating the home page. Was she going to do something about it? Was she going to show the plane crashing into the World Trade Center down there, in the improvised “bad news” section, along with Toninho’s death?

[Carina]: Right then I called Leão.

[Vitor]: So she called Leão, who was stuck in traffic on his way to the editorial office and had no idea what had happened.

[Leão]: And she tells me, “Leão, there was an accident in New York. A plane hit the World Trade Center…”

[Vitor]: Hearing that news, Leão recalled what had happened in 1945 when a plane lost control and crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building…

[Archive Soundbite]

[Journalist]: “The Empire State Building’s 79th floor was hardest hit by the crash”…

[Vitor]: It was a small plane that did not cause major damage to the building.

[Leão]: So I thought, “Oh, again, what a shame.” 

[Carina]: And he said, “It’s not worth it. It may be an accident…”

[Vitor]: Leão told Carina that he was convinced it was a minor accident, and went on to say:

[Leão]: “Okay, Carina, today is the day for good news. So put this news on the bad news website, and let’s move on.”

[Vitor]: It wouldn’t be an accident like that, so far from Brazil, that would put the day’s plan at risk on iG. But before hanging up the phone, he saidr something else:

[Leão]: “And please don’t call me with every piece of bad news, because today is Good News Day.”

[Vitor]: Carina couldn’t believe it, and neither could the others.

[Carina]: Começam a chegar as pessoas, as pessoas começam a chegar e começam a cobrar e começam a ligar de outros setores da empresa na minha orelha. “E aí, gente? Que boa notícia, o mundo acabou, vocês tão dando boa notícia? Vamos tirar isso, vamos tirar isso.” E eu não tenho o poder de tirar isso.

[Vitor]: More and more people came in to complain. Not only journalists, but employees from different sectors of the company questioned why they were going ahead with the day of good news in that context. First, the murder of the mayor, now a plane crash in New York. “The world is coming to an end and you are showing good news?” they said. But Carina tried to explain that she did not have the power to make that decision. 

[Carina]: E, no meio desse fervo, desse stress. 

[Vitor]: And in the middle of that upheaval and that stress…

[Carina]: Bate o segundo. 

[Vitor]: A second plane crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Media outlet]: Oh my god…

[Vitor]: Updates on the tragedy continued to appear in all the world’s media.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Journalist]: Another one, another plane just hit on, my god, another plane has hit another building, flew right into the middle of it, explosion…

[Archive Soundbite]

[Journalist]: It was an actual airplane that crashed there. And now there’s a second one, a second accident… This is astounding.

[Archive Soundbite]

[Journalist]: It hit the other tower, in an even lower area. Good God, it seems that another plane crashed into the other tower.

[Vitor]: Only 17 minutes had passed since the first impact. Now there was no room for doubt. There was no way could this be a mere accident. It was an act of terrorism.

With this, Carina did not care what Leão had told her, and she called him again. He was still stuck in traffic.

[Leão]: She said “Leão, Carina here”.

[Carina]: And I said, “Leão, another airplane has crashed. This is terrorism.”

[Leão]: Another plane hit the World Trade Center. It’s a terrorist attack. 

[Vitor]: But by this point, Carina had already made up her mind.

[Carina]: ”I’m going to post this. Good News Day is over. It is over. Forget about Good News Day. At this point you may as well kick me out, because this is the decision I’m making.”

[Vitor]: She told Leão that it no longer mattered what he said, that she was going to put the Twin Towers story on the front page of the site, even if it cost her the job.

[Leão]: “I’m putting it on the front page, and when you get here I’ll quit. ¿Eh? And good-bye.” And click! And she hung up.

[Vitor]: She had only minutes to redo the iG homepage if she wanted to get it done before Leão, her boss, arrived. 

[Carina]: I made that decision. I put an end to Good News Day. I ended it.

[Vitor]: She changed that rosy page—which had already been stained by the mayor’s murder—and put the terrorist attack on the front page. She did so with conviction, but still with the fear that Leão would fire her. 

[Carina]: I was really nervous. I’d just had to hang up right on Leão’s face.

[Vitor]: She had hung up the phone on her boss and disobeyed his orders, but there was nothing he could do now… In all the media—not just the one that had come up with the now ridiculous idea of highlighting only good news—the agenda had changed.

[Amauri]: And from then on, our day took a completely different direction.

[Vitor]: Here is again Amauri, the former director of journalism at Globo. He says that that day also took a completely different course for them than planned. 

[Amauri]: Our plan of broadcasting the news from Campinas had to be abandoned.

[Vitor]: They completely ruled out going to Campinas to cover the mayor’s murder. The local newspapers continued to talk about the case, but not the national media. All the spotlights were focused on New York.

From that moment on, the newscasts looped scenes of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, and talked about the simultaneous attack on the Pentagon and the hypotheses about the terrorist attack… That was the beginning of the repertoire that would accompany us for years: the Taliban, Bin Laden, the Axis of Evil, the War on Terror. It was as if all the media had only one button, the bad news button.

Well, there is bad news, and very bad news. And the bad news from New York buried the bad news about Toninho. Toninho had the bad luck of dying just before an eclipse that prevented us from seeing practically anything else.

OK, we are talking about one death versus thousands of deaths. But is it a question of the number of victims? If it were a terrorist attack with the same number of deaths, I don’t know, in Iraq, in Mozambique, in Costa Rica… would the media give it the same importance?

I wonder how everything would have proceeded if these two events had not crossed paths. Could it be that if the coverage of Toninho’s murder had been much greater, there would have been more pressure to investigate who killed Toninho and why? Because the crime went unpunished. In 2021, the statute of limitations kicked in, and in 2022, the investigation was archived.

The theory of the Police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office is that Toninho was probably a victim of urban violence. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But his family and some of his political allies believe that the investigation was flawed and conducted carelessly. They still believe that it was a premeditated crime. In any case, Toninho’s death, the first bad news of September 11, 2001, was forgotten, just like all the good news that iG reporters had prepared for that day.

[Vitor]: But let’s go back to the morning of September 11. When Leão finally got to the iG office…

[Leão]: I walked into the newsroom and everyone was frozen, and I stood still in front of the television screen.

I could see the plane, the huge, big plane crashing, exploding. It was an apocalyptic scene.

[Vitor]: On the screen, he saw people running through the streets, screaming, asking for help, in panic… Clouds of smoke that were getting bigger and bigger… Once there, watching the images, it didn’t take long for him to realize the seriousness of the situation. He went immediately to look for Carina.

[Leão]: I went to her immediately and said, “Thank you very much, congratulations. You made the right decision.”

And I believe it was the most efficient insubordination in the history of journalism.

[Vitor]: From that moment on, iG continued to devote its entire website to the attack. The day of good news was officially over. 

Leão recalls that at this point, not even the marketing managers dared question the decision. In fact, no one wanted to take responsibility for the idea anymore. 

[Leão]: After the tragedy, nobody wanted to take credit for the bad idea, right?

[Vitor]: And, although the reason was more than obvious, Leão told me that he and his bosses decided to publish an editorial column explaining why they were not going to hold Good News Day. 

[Leão]: Something along the lines of “We wanted to make it a good news day. But history didn’t allow it.” 

[Vitor]: “We tried, but we couldn’t.”

The more than 150 good news articles they had produced over a month would remain there, stored in the iG archives. And most likely, according to Leão, the many stories—imagine articles like a profile of a beloved teacher, a mother who adopted several children, an NGO helping to save a forest—would never be published. The good news remained in limbo, lost in a sea of so much bad news.

Today, 23 years later, the journalists who worked at iG at that time are still in touch. When they meet, they remember that “Good News Day” and ask themselves the same question as in 2001: “Is good news real news?” For Carina, if a news item is something completely harmless and is good for everyone, perhaps it is not news.

[Carina]: Does good news have to be good for everyone? Because if it’s good for everyone, maybe it’s nothing, you know, maybe nothing is happening.

[Vitor]: Leão, however, no longer believes so strongly in the phrase “good news, no news.” Today he teaches Ethics at a college of journalism and talks about this with his students.

[Leão]: Today I am convinced that we put too much emphasis on bad news in journalism, and this has to change.

[Vitor]: He feels that the media exaggerate bad news and that this results in a distorted view of reality. For example, says Leão, in all big cities on the planet…

[Leão]: New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, London, Paris.

[Vitor]: The rates of violence in all these places are lower than they were 20 or 30 years ago.

[Leão]: But the press continues to publish crimes as if the statistics had not changed. So we create the perception in the population that crime is increasing or is the same.

[Vitor]: And, for Leão, this way of representing the world has a very strong and profound impact:

[Leão]: With this, the population votes for Trump, for Bolsonaro, for Milei or others in Europe, extremists who have the idea of a police state, dedicated to fighting crime, and everyone feels threatened by a crime rate that… that is actually decreasing.

[Vitor]: That is why Leão believes the media need to achieve greater balance.

[Leão]: Today I believe that good news should be considered news, and that more attention and more emphasis should be given to good news. 

[Vitor]: Despite this, he is convinced of one thing: He would definitely not do a Good News Day again. 

[Daniel]: A Portuguese version of this story was published by Vitor Hugo Brandalise and Bia Guimarães on the Brazilian podcast Rádio Novelo Apresenta, where they both work as producers. 

This story was edited by Camila Segura, Aneris Casassus and me. Bruno Scelza did the fact-checking. Sound design is by Andrés Azpiri and Rémy Lozano, with music by Rémy.

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Paola Alean, Lisette Arévalo, Pablo Argüelles, Lucía Auerbach, Adriana Bernal, Diego Corzo, Emilia Erbetta, Rémy Lozano, Selene Mazón, Juan David Naranjo, Melisa Rabanales, Natalia Ramírez, Barbara Sawhill, David Trujillo, Ana Tuirán, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, Luis Fernando Vargas and Desirée Yépez.

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast of Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed on the Hindenburg PRO program.

If you enjoyed this episode and want us to continue doing independent journalism about Latin America, support us through Deambulantes, our membership program. Visit radioambulante.org/donar and help us continue narrating the region.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Daniel Alarcón. Thanks for listening.