José Alfonso Malespín

Journalist and professor of Printed Journalism at Universidad Centroamericana, UCA, Managua.

Reporter, Section Editor and Assistant to the General Editor of Diario Barricada 1990-1996.

As a reporter I wrote about issues like City Hall, National Government, Elections in countries like Germany, Honduras and Costa Rica and the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. I also reported on issues like the Gulf War, the Property Problem in Germany, the killing of Pablo Escobar, the War in Bosnia, Human Rights Violations during the 1980s in Central America and did investigative reporting on public corruption during the Violeta de Chamorro’s administration.

I was head of the International News Section and the Culture and Entertainment Section between 1991 and 1993.

As Assistant to the General Editor I took part in the planning and designing of the daily editions between 1993 and 1996.

During my years at UCA I have been Editor of Aità, a newspaper founded in 1997 with a group of Journalism students, the year I came to work as a full time professor. I am a member of the Editorial Board of “Encuentro” (Encounters), the official magazine of UCA and editor of “Colección Comunicaciones” which is dedicated to publishing books about Communications and Journalism.

I have also worked as a broadcaster and script writer during the 1980s before coming to UCA to study Journalism. I graduated as a Journalist in 1992 and later went to Sweden for a Journalism and Environment postgraduate course in 1999. Two years ago I attended a postgraduate course on Management and Design of Projects.

Last December I published “Bluefields en la memoria” (Bluefields in our memory), a historical report on the most important Nicaraguan city on our Caribbean coast. This book was thought for schoolers and people of the Pacific area of the country, where the history, culture and geography of the Caribbean Coast is barely known.

I teach a class of Printed Journalism to second year students. In this class they gain their first knowledge about the profession. This group works a newspaper that publishes every fifteen days. The other class I teach is dedicated to students who will certainly work in newspapers. Here they exercise in a real life simulated scenario most of the things they will find in the newsroom and the problems they could face while reporting and editing. This groups does research with me on journalists and printed media.