In the 90 years since its creation, Excelsior has gone from being a private company to a “cooperative company,” owned by its workers and in-line with the now-extinct one-Party political system, to again being privately owned. In January 2006, a private group, Grupo Empresarial Angeles, bought out Excelsior. This anniversary also serves to celebrate freedom of press in Mexico.

Excelsior is inviting ten great newspapers around the world to participate in a series of special reports.

The following papers will participate in the March 19 anniversary conference:

The Turkish Daily News - Ankara, Turkey
The Houston Chronicle – Houston, Texas
Le Figaro – Paris, France
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – Frankfurt, Germany
El Dia De Cordoba – Cordoba, Spain
Toronto Star – Toronto, Canada
ABC – Madrid, Spain
Arizona Republic –Phoenix, Arizona

The following papers couldn’t attend but were interested by the project:

La Tercera - Santiago, Chile
The Daily Telegraph – London, UK
The Irish Times – Dublin, Ireland
The London Times – London, UK
Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten – Denmark

Assignments will be about international affairs, sports, culture, art and people. Each is written by a journalist from a different newspaper. Each is on a different subject, but on a topic close to the heart of the people of Mexico.

These will be personal accounts, not news stories. Together they will provide a global perspective on the most important concerns of people everywhere. The subjects will be big (global warming, immigration, world trade) but the view will be from one set of eyes.

The series will run in the month of April, culminating in a two-day celebratory conference in Mexico, to which all participants will be invited for a presentation or panel.

All of the stories will be available in Spanish and English. Translations will be made by Excelsior and approved by the author, or locally if that will yield a better result. Separate arrangements will be made for an accompanying artwork.

2 Questions & Answers about the project with Pascal Beltran del Rio, editor in chief of the Excelsior

Topics are said to be international but close to the heart of Mexico – what kind of subjects will you be covering?

Although this is still an ongoing process, I am confident feedback will be terrific. The globalized economy has both good and negative effects. Several of these topics are common to many countries. We are thinking about themes such as migration and the environment. For example, global warming has had terrible effects on the Arctic, but they can also be felt in Mexico in coastal towns and rural areas; any effort to report on these news from a merely domestic point of view is by definition incomplete. I could say the same about migration: Thousands of Mexicans try to reach the US every year, but so do Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, who use Mexican territory as a passage… and they suffer many times from similar forms of mistreatment and discrimination as Mexican undocumented workers in the US. Likewise, there are common experiences in Mexicans willing to cross the Arizona desert to find a better way of life and in African “boat people” trying to reach the Canary Islands. Scores of the former and the latter die during these journeys.

What are you trying to achieve by this?

What we are trying to achieve is a broadened perspective on common problems, goals and opportunities. We’d like to give our readers a chance to review these issues through the eyes of journalists of foreign news organizations and get a Mexican perspective of what is happening abroad. We feel our newspaper and its readers will benefit in many ways from this alliance. We plan to concentrate first on these stories, and move on to different projects.

Source: Excelsior – Pascal Beltran del Rio, editor in chief Excelsior