Every since reading Ali Kamel’s glowing praise for the Innovation International Media Consulting Group, in a strange article defending the firm from (phantom?) charges that it promoted the agenda of Opus Dei, I have been curious about the company and interested in learning about its activities in more detail.
As you can see in the rough organizational map appended to this post, the consultancy’s founding partners and its president emeritus are all former senior officials at the Opus Dei-founded University of Navarra, whose journalism program maintains an extension here in São Paulo known as the Masters [sic] em Jornalismo program.
The head of that program, frequent Estado de S. Paulo editorial contributor Carlos Alberto di Franco, caused quite a flap during the 2006 presidential campaign here when he admitted in an interview with IstoÉ magazine that he was the Opus Dei spiritual adviser to presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin — who is listed as alumnus of the program on its Web site. See
During the campaign, Alckmin repeatedly claimed that the PCC criminal group had conspired with the FARC and the PT political party to assassinate state military policemen as a part of a strategy to undermine his candidacy. Which is gibbering nonsense, but he actually continues to repeat it, even after his sabbatical at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
Apparently the spirit of veritas failed to rub off on the guy.
Are these the sort of journalistic ethics Alckmin learned at Masters?
The company no longer seems to publish a client list on its Web site, but it is possible to note similarities between the Web site design and editorial strategies of clients we know about — Kamel refers to Globo, El País, Libération, and USA TODAY, for instance — and other news organizations.
The Web sites of El Tiempo (Colombia) and the Estado de S. Paulo (Brazil), for example, bear many similarities, design-wise, to that of El País, a known Innovation client. Have they received advice from the consultancy?
There are also some points of editorial policy that seem to ring a bell from time to time — if the newspaper suddenly starts providing very heavy coverage of Second Life, for example, it is often an Innovation client.
I mean that quite seriously. (Remember when Reuters set up a “bureau” in Second Life? Globo’s G1 news portal also has a “bureau” on Ilha Brasil. The last time I visited — in the guise of an extremely heavily armed naked fat chick — no one was home.)
At any rate, I often find it useful to use the CMap tool (above) to start to outline organizational relationships.
What do these people have in common? How do they know one another?
It’s a rude and crude first approximation to “social network analysis” that has, at least, some heuristic value.
But you really cannot get very far toward trying to evaluate just what the Innovation way of journalism is without a client list.
More as it comes in.
Here is a PDF version of that first rough-draft concept map.
Any tips on who Innovation International’s past and current clients are would be welcome.
What’s Next: The New Media Lanscape. Join INNOVATION at the Harvard Faculty Club on October 24.
Filed under: Journalism, Media | Tagged: geraldo alckmin, innovation, innovation internatoinal media consulting group, innovation journalism, Journalism, journalism 2.0, newspapers, opus dei, Politics
