Breathe
By Claudia Pérez Atamoros
Last November 12, Soledad Durazo began her gratitude for the National Lifetime Achievement Award for Journalism by recalling how in her childhood, riding her bicycle, she used to ride through the dusty streets of her beloved Granados, delivering the newspaper that used to reach them from time to time...
My brain clicked by association of ideas. She was clearly referring to the job of deliveryman and I remembered the voceadores, that profession that faded away in Mexico. Those shouters who corner by corner, tall after tall, jumped into the streets to offer La Extra, Ovaciones, Diario de la Tarde and even La Prensa. La Prensa y Alarma (with all their marvelous headlines, albeit, yellowish and ingenious, brutal) that were indispensable for all newspapers to have sales or not; they awakened morbidity or uneasiness?
For years and "happy days" the figure of the voceador was part of the daily life of the city and there were also times when they "dropped everything" by vetoing the sale of Exçelsior and its evening editions and years later, the Reforma newspaper. In both episodes, the workers of those emblematic national newspapers left on their own feet and with full right to speak out, regardless of whether they were renowned journalists or executives. They pulled up their pants and became town criers. They aroused the empathy and solidarity of their readers and set an example of how to defend their jobs. And, on both occasions, as the days went by... the leaders of the voceadores returned to let those newspapers be voiced.
The voceadores began to sell newspapers in the streets before they were organized. It was on January 15, 1923, that La Unión de Voceadores was formed as a result of a meeting of members of the Sindicato de Redactores y Empleados de la Prensa. That union, when it was led by Enrique Gómez Corchado, built a hotel in Acapulco, a clinic in Mexico City, a sports center and that same leader managed to get the first houses built there in San Juan de Aragón for its members. What happened to all that? Where did the little ball go, who knows!
Bucareli Street was always his place. The famous Esquina de la Información, and its surroundings, was the neuralgic center and strategic point of the Mexico of the vendors and deliverymen.
The printed letter, the precise word, would not have slipped into our daily lives if they and their daily work had not existed. They made the newspaper become our daily bread.
Today its place has been taken by the networks. Inegi records that newspaper readership decreased from 49.4% in 2015 to 17.8% in 2024. And that, until April of this year, no newspaper had managed to exceed one million copies sold.
Mexico's voceadores were called by different names over the years. In the beginning they were town criers who told the news, then they were the papeleros who shouted the news while handing out just a sheet of paper. When the Gazeta de México was founded, they were called Gazeteros...
In 1823 "voceadores", children and teenagers who dedicated themselves to the profession, were prohibited because they were considered "agitators". By 1853, they were allowed to announce the name of the newspaper they offered and nothing else, since the authorities considered that if they stopped communicating the content, people would not become agitated. In 1895, those who engaged in this activity were imprisoned because they were scandalous and harmful to good living.
For years they defended their craft with courage and wit. Now, they are practically extinct and have been replaced by professional haters, first on Twitter and now on X. The eight columns are no longer shouted, but barbarities are shouted and texted. There is no longer the illusion of running to the newsstand on Sundays to look for "the little monkeys", or bragging to your friends that you read them a day before for being a subscriber, no, NO!
Ovaciones, Alarma and La Prensa remained in the "kindergarten" with their red note articles and their sparkling announcers, although they were not "golden coins" either, because when they received orders from their leaders, they delayed the announcement of a newspaper or simply did not shout it out or sell it.
What sells now is the discredit, the lie. The "tweets or X's", full of hate, of offenses, of "fakes". And when the tweeters or xersters receive an order, they do synchronized swimming and the networks are filled with "bots".
The voceadores are extinct, a few newspaper sellers remain. How much life will print media have left?
The readership of Mexican newspapers is also in decline.
And how long will journalists be around? Will we be replaced by texters or AI?
Will we continue to "act as if the virgin is talking to us"?
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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