Ramon Alberto Garza, editor of Mexico City's upstart newspaper Reforma, likes to tell a story about the day shortly after the paper started publishing that the congressional press office tried to give one of his reporters a television set.
"We said, `No way, Jose,' " Garza recalled, turning back what he viewed as a not-too-subtle attempt to influence the journalist's reporting.In the annals of Mexican journalism, what was surprising about the episode was not that the gift was offered but that the newspaper turned it down. Nowadays, there's a sign in Reforma's front foyer that says: "Forgive us for not taking gifts. Journalism is clean."
As its title suggests, Reforma is trying to change Mexican journalism, to put an end to a tradition of cronyism in which a largely sycophantic media have marched to the drumbeat of a succession of governments put in place by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
In the nearly 3 1/2 years since it started publishing, Reforma, with a daily circulation of 100,000, has altered the way news is reported. It regularly challenges the government and is spurring other dailies into more aggressive coverage.
"I think it's (creating) a complete revolution in Mexican journalism," said Bill Orme, director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Reforma was the brainchild of Alejandro Junco, 48, who drew on his experience publishing El Norte, Reforma's sister paper in the northern industrial city of Monterrey.
Educated at the University of Texas in Austin, Junco set out in the 1970s to transform the family-owned Monterrey daily into a different kind of newspaper. "The idea was to do unbiased coverage - facts not opinions," said Garza, who is also executive editor of El Norte.
El Norte offered its readers shorter, livelier stories and a lot of colorful graphics and photographs that give it the look of USA Today. Mexico's more-traditional papers usually are packed with dense, opinion-laden articles that frequently continue for page after numbing page.
Today, El Norte is the country's largest daily newspaper, with a circulation of 135,000.
"We did it out of principle, and it turned out to be good business strategy," Junco said. In 1993, Junco drew on bank loans to put $50 million into creating Reforma - an El Norte clone in the capital city.
One immediate problem was hiring a staff. Since Mexico's seasoned journalists were trained in newsrooms where government bribes, patronage and bias are the rule, Reforma went directly to the country's universities. Most of the paper's 400 journalists were hired directly out of college, then educated in Reforma-sponsored journalism classes.
"We decided to pay the price of inexperience over the price of being molded by that experience," said Garza, who visited 18 universities, collected 5,000 job applications and narrowed that down to 240 people who were trained in Reforma courses.
From the start, the paper broke some important stories, like a 1993 report that Education Secretary Fausto Alzati had lied about getting a degree from Harvard University. Alzati later resigned.
In covering the complex and ever-changing political assassination and economic mismanagement scandals that have dominated Mexico for the past two years, Reforma often has led the pack.
This winter, Garza became the first Mexican reporter to get an extensive interview with former President Carlos Salinas, who is living in disgraced self-exile in Dublin.
In the interview, Salinas talked about the slew of scandals that arose during his administration, including those surrounding his brother Raul, currently in jail on charges of embezzlement and masterminding one of two political murders in 1994.
Less dramatically, Reforma regularly publishes opinion polls and charts on political trends, social services and economics. They are poured over by readers in a country where even basic statistics often are harbored like state secrets.
As a result of Reforma's success, competition on major stories between Mexico's five newspapers, especially between Reforma and the Mexico City daily La Jornada, has picked up. Some journalists say the scoop wars haven't been completely for the best.
"Reporters don't know what to do without (government) controls," said Carlos Puig, editor of the investigative magazine Proceso. "What it's done is to create bad journalism. Everything is printed, leaks, rumors."
Despite these growing pains, most free-press supporters credit Reforma with playing a major role in attacking a system of bribes, subsidies and patronage that long has tarnished the newspaper industry. "Reforma has been the first to reject the entire system," Orme said.
Even its supporters, however, point out that the paper has benefited from its owner's deep pockets in warding off outside influence.
Reforma is breaking even from its advertising revenue and circulation, according to Garza. Together, Reforma and El Norte operate several profit-making electronic financial services.
The cash flow has allowed the paper to pay reporters several times what they could make at other papers, which makes them less susceptible to bribes.