Caracas Chronicles

Oi! We’ve got news. Caracas Chronicles has gone through several iterations of the blog along the years: In 2015, we surfed the crazy US dollar leverage era and were able to grow our team and our reach to different regions of Venezuela. Then, in 2019, one of the most insane years of the political crisis, we went on to build our Spanish language sister site, Cinco8, to dive into a deeper conversation on what Venezuela has become. 

Four years flashed by and now the world, Venezuela, and the news landscape have become even more hostile toward media organizations. 

At the beginning of the year, we decided to review the whole model to be able to adapt to 2023. The conclusion was that we needed a leaner structure to survive (yes, you know what that means), but at the same time we had to be able to react quickly to whatever was going on in Venezuela—something we weren’t really doing. Therefore: we needed more of a fit structure (fit as in crossfit). As a consequence, our team suffered. We had to cut costs and let some very valuable people move on.

We won’t dive into the media model discussion because that’s a valley of tears, but we keep our Political Risk Report and voluntary subscriptions very much alive and close to our hearts.

After ripping off several bandaids and enduring through a storm of brain fog, we have three announcements :

1. Young blood

In LinkedIn language: We’re delighted to break the news that Tony Frangie will be joining our editorial staff. After many years of collaborating together and having published his first article in the interwebs with us, Tony’s finally joining in to work on the other side of the curtain. We’re hoping he will help us usher Caracas Chronicles into this strange new era of tikititoks, robot armies, and mad scientist billionaires. The pairing with our Editor-in-chief, Rafael Osio Cabrices, will surely bring great results.

Tony has an interesting mixture of experience in international news organizations and social media savviness that will be very useful for telling powerful stories in the most creative ways. 

2. El Feed

You may have noticed that for the past few months we’ve been testing a new tool to make quick updates on whatever’s happening in Venezuela. If you haven’t noticed, then go to the homepage, do a quick scroll, and come back. What you saw (if you followed instructions) is El Feed.

What can El Feed do? A bunch of stuff:

• We can post videos from different platforms and play them directly on the homepage. Watch Youtube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter (o sea, X) videos or listen to a podcast directly from a Spotify, Apple, or Anchor embed. We can write short posts, like sticky notes that you’ll be able to read directly from El Feed.
• You’ll find our posts, of course.
• It’s easy to highlight pieces from other media or to bring back some of our old articles. Each feed can have its own headline, like the front page of a newspaper. And like a newspaper we save it so you can check it back later.
• Each feed is a single page that can be shared like a post, but if you keep scrolling past it, you’ll find our regular blog doom scroll.
• Super important: Each feed is archived so you can go back and see what was happening in Venezuela on a given date.
• Also, each feed has its own COMMENT section. 
• You can also subscribe. Whenever we publish a new feed, you will receive an email notification to click through and read at your convenience. And no, it’s not exactly a newsletter. What’s the difference? The difference is that it can be updated throughout the day en caliente.

In summary: This tool is a curated feed of Venezuela news yanked from wherever you can post online. A way to highlight what’s going on in our little corner of insanity in real time.

With El Feed we want to try and bring all the Venezuela madness to one place, just like the platform formerly known as Twitter 😉 Let’s see how it goes. But clearly we cannot insist on a 2015 media model in 2023.

3. Blogging

In all its shapes and forms, but especially in writing. We’re aiming for a compulsively readable Caracas Chronicles that features the kinds of debates that otherwise get lost in discussions in English about our country. We’ll do that by foregrounding our Venezuelan filter: Caracas Chronicles has always been about bringing a Venezuelan perspective on Venezuelan affairs. Here’s the ultimate guide to writing for Caracas Chronicles.

So pitch, tell us about those subjects that obsess you. What would you like to write about in 500, 600, or 1,000 words? What other ways of telling your story can you think of? Video? Memes? El Feed lo aguanta todo.

Instead of holding on to the 2015 thing, it seems we’re closer to doing the 2002 thing. Oh, well.