Talk:The Argentina Independent

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A Farewell Message from The Indy Editors 4th January 2017 Kristie Robinson & Marc Rogers

The time has come to say goodbye.

For just over a decade, The Indy (formerly known as The Argentimes) has been a fully-independent media outlet covering Argentina and Latin America from our headquarters in Buenos Aires. Much has changed at The Indy, in the media, and in the region since June 2006, but our core mission was constant: connect an English-language audience with the news and events of Argentina and Latin America, focusing especially on those issues that go underreported in the mainstream media here and abroad.

Unfortunately, the harsh realities of running a small, independent publication have caught up with us, and we have made the difficult decision to discontinue The Indy. It is no secret that the whole media sector is facing a funding crisis, affecting even the biggest global outlets, and though we explored many options we have been unable to turn this labour of love into a financially-sustainable organisation. In the end, the decision to call it a day is for personal reasons: now is right time for each of us to move on to other life projects.

We reach the end with feelings of sadness, but also a great deal of pride. Many people are surprised to find out that The Indy has never really had an editorial budget to speak of, something we feel represents the quality of our content. Even as commercial constraints mounted, we did everything we could to maintain our emphasis on conducting ‘real’ journalism: that is, original content produced with on-the-ground research and a critical eye. No newsroom (especially in Argentina) can claim to be completely neutral or impartial – we’ve never been shy about our support for progressive politics, environmental causes, and social justice movements – but our editorial guidelines always insisted on balance.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the hundreds of people who offered their time and energy to support The Indy. We thank each and every one of you for your contribution, which enabled us to produce more than 11,000 articles, including many photo essays and video stories, that touched on all aspects of life in this part of the world. We also thank the teams who worked on our events and in our commercial and marketing areas for the time they put in.

The Indy website will remain live for the time being, and in the coming weeks and months we will be posting articles from our extensive archive on our social media pages. We will also sporadically share other content from around the web that we feel matches what we strove to achieve here. Beyond that, we’ll see…

Our final thanks go to you, our readers, who for ten years motivated us to continue managing The Indy. We hope to have left you better informed about the goings on in this country, which we have come to love as our second home.

We’d also like to ask for one more favour from you: demand more from the media. Though there are people and publications turning out stellar work, we fear that standards of journalism are being pushed aside in favour of cheap content: regurgitated material (often unverified) rather than original research; attention-grabbing headlines with little substance below; personal opinions masquerading as expert analysis. Demand more, and when you find an outlet that is willing to invest in quality, independent journalism, support it in whatever way you can. It’s the only way we can save the media industry from giving up more ground to the powers it should be scrutinising.

We wish you all the best for 2017 and beyond.

Saludos!

Indy Editors (Kristie and Marc) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.36.32.188 (talk) 14:09, 27 February 2017 (UTC)