So, mediapocalypse is coming to México
It was an extintion long overdue.
News media industry in Mexico is suffering something akin to the Chicxulub meteorite impact in Yucatán about 66 million years ago. Famous media contributors are being fired and printed outlets are closing by the hour. Some media head honchos in printed media have been shown the door like Rubén Cortés, La Razón newspaper editor and Carlos Marín, Chief Content Officer in Milenio media group.
Columnists like Roger Bartra, Lorenzo Meyer and José Woldenberg in Reforma, Hugo García Michel and Jairo Calixto Albarrán in Milenio and whole magazines like Fernanda (a monthly glossy) are feeling the axe.
What’s going on?
Mexico newspaper industry was spared from the massive extintion fueled by the arise of Facebook, Google and digital alikes as the de facto world news (and revenue) global distributors. Newsdesks from New York to Madrid and Buenos Aires have been decimated by the loss of the natural monopolies on advertising they enjoyed and the diminishing readers’ interest for paying news when they can get them sort of free.
Interestingly, mexican newspaper industry didn’t suffer any loss of revenue. In fact, the opposite happened. If you look at the data from the national bureau of statistics (Inegi) monthly poll of economic activity (Encuesta Mensual de Servicios) you can see something interesting in the green line which represents industry revenue as an index where January of 2008 = 100.

Despite the fact payroll for printed newspapers ( blue line) has been in a steep decline in the past few years, revenue has experienced the opposite. For the untrained eye, it would be a mistery, but there’s been a little dirty secret behind this bonanza.
Governments have become the Great Newsreader (el Gran Lector).
In the past years, the amount of money spent by federal government (and we don’t have data on state and county level) on paid propaganda has grown by grossly hacking the regulation. If you see this graph, created by the NGO México Evalúa on a study about federal expenditure on propaganda you’ll see two lines.

The yellow line is the expenditure federal government declared to spend according to the yearly federal budget. The red line is the money government effectively spent on paid propaganda. Why is that? Well, federal government is able to make corrections and amendments on the budget, spending money differently and informing about budget modifications ex post, like a child putting his hands on the cookie jar and telling his mom:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Just to have a scale on the dimension for this, in 2017 federal government (and I must say it again, just federal government) effectively spent 6,355 million pesos, like 322 million USD on propaganda, about 3 times (3.05, to be precise) the money they originally planned to spend. Obviously the money has also gone to radio, tv and internet outlets but Mexico has become a country flourishing with printed media in the newsstands and one of the few places in the world where new printed media have been born recently like La Razón (born in 2009) and El Heraldo (reborn in 2016) daily newspapers, and Moi, another glossy magazine in 2014.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) upcoming administration made a pledge to cut in half the money spent on propaganda, poquito, porque es bendito, AMLO said. We don’t know yet if he’s talking about planned or effectively spent money, but if he sticks to the official budget which stated about 2,083 million pesos in 2017 for propaganda, we’d see for 2019 something alike 1,000 million pesos for this purpose. That would be about 16% (15.7%) for the effective money the feds put on media moguls hands last year.
And we haven’t talked about state governments. At least 19 governors, among them some of the most populared states liks Estado de México, Puebla and Veracruz, will have for the first time local legislatures populated with adversarial MORENA majority lawmakers. All of them have promised to put an end to the expenditure on promotion and advertising, clipping the wings for governors like Alfredo del Mazo, one of the heaviest users of paid promotion on media.
What will happpen at the end? Nobody knows for sure but it won’t be surprising to see this slo-motion meteorite falling over media heads.
