The best of the Latin American media industry, all in one place

Paulo Samia joined UOL in 2000, holding the positions of financial manager at UOL Brasil and general manager at UOL Argentina until 2006. After working at consulting (Booz Allen and Hamilton) and technology companies, he returned to UOL in 2016, as Strategic Planning Director and Director of Business Development, until he became UOL’s CEO in 2019. Paulo holds an undergraduate and graduate degree in business administration from Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, in New York.

A political scientist and journalist specialized in international relations, Esther holds a BA from the University of Barcelona (UAB).

Her extensive professional experience, started in 1986, when she worked in Catalunya Ràdio, TV3,
l’Avui, and collaborated as a columnist for El País. For 5 years she worked as a representative of 24h CNN+ and of Cuatro TV in Catalonia.
From 2011 to 2015 she worked as a Special Advisor and Chief of Staff of the Conseller of Economy and Innovation of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Andreu Mas-Colell, focusing on promoting Catalan economy and the activity of the Catalan government at al international level.
Since January 5, 2016, she has been the director of ARA.

Javier is currently the Managing Director of Condé Nast Mexico and Latin America; one of the main media groups in the country.

Javier Esteban has a recognized career in the world of media, entertainment and advertising, where he has played an active role in the industry, promoting the digital transformation of traditional media.

His deep knowledge of technology applied to business growth has led him to found, advise, direct and participate in different technology-based companies.

After a career in the event production field for over two decades, Pedro joined GFR Media in 2019 as the CEO of eMotions, the company’s experiential and event production agency.

His background includes experiences in the banking and automotive industries, before launching as an entrepreneur founding several companies (TSHP, La Marketa & Co), as well as managing projects related to the production of large-scale events both in Puerto Rico and in key markets in the United States. Some of these include: El Mercado Urbano, Ventana al Jazz and PR Open, among many others.

Julián is an expert in digital communication.
He has worked simultaneously in journalism, advertising and politics, and has been a consultant for numerous media and mass consumption companies in Argentina and abroad.

He is an advisor to Clarín -he was part of the founding team behind the online version of the newspaper-, and carried out institutional advertising campaigns for TN as well. He advised El Imparcial newspaper and Debate group (both from Mexico). He was a mentor for Facebook’s Video Accelerator Project.

Alejandro Laso COO of El Confidencial, one of the most widely read and influential newspapers in Spain. He studied journalism and computer science, two degrees that a few years back seemed at odds with each other.

In 2000, still without setting foot in a university classroom, he founded and directed several local media in Madrid (radio and online newspapers) which today, more than two decades later, are still operational.

He worked for Mundo Deportivo (sports newspaper), Onda Madrid, Onda Cero (radio) and other digital media. In 2010 he joined El Confidencial where he led the digital transformation of the news outlet, creating the Lab of El Confidencial, the innovation, data, product, and new narratives area. He was appointed COO in 2020.

Patricia Jebsen has a BA in Public Relations (UADE) and an MBA in Marketing and Business Administration (European Business School) in Germany and a Master’s degree in Corporate Communication and Journalism (UCES). She also completed the EICOM Digital Transformation and Innovation Executive Program at the University of Cambridge, among others.

Throughout her professional career, she has served in different companies, but specifically in e-commerce, she was Regional Omnichannel Manager at Cencosud, e-commerce manager at Falabella, e-commerce manager at CMD (Grupo Clarín) and Supply Manager at Mercado Libre, among others. He also led Beat operations in Argentina and Chile as general manager and Rappi in Argentina and Uruguay.

Josyette is Co-founder and managing director of Tempo Media, full-service creative content development and production business team, focused on creating and show-running original IP, Fiction & Non-fiction, for TV and Media Platforms, concentrated on the US Hispanic and LATAM market, with established production operations in 2 countries.

Alejandro Lladó has spent the last 15 years leading different areas of digital business transformation in media companies. He is currently the Digital Director of Medcom, the most important multimedia company in Panama.

His previous role was as Digital Director of Grupo América in Argentina, where he built the area from scratch. He transformed traditional media into new digital proposals and created the commercial area with a focus on providing brands and agencies with an innovative service to reach the target audience in each of their campaigns. He led the creation of new media (UNO.com.ar and A24.com) with a strategic vision on new audiences, new formats and new languages. All award- winning media outlets.

Martha Ramos Sosa is chief editorial officer of the Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM), the largest Mexican print media company and the largest newspaper company in Latin America. The company owns a large newswire service, it includes 45 Mexican daily newspapers and 44 websites.

As head of the Public Affairs and Media Policy department in WAN-IFRA, Elena is responsible for identifying and studying the main policy issues that affect the news publishing industry globally, writing articles and reports, and speaking at international conferences. She is in charge of international cooperation in all policy matters and of synergies with member associations and like-minded organisations in the regional and global landscape. She represents the interests of news publishers in the Internet Governance environment.
Graduated in law, with a master’s in Constitutional Law and an LLM in International Trade Law, Elena has been working at the World Association of News Publishers since 2006.

Javier Kraviez is Digital Business Director at Clarín, where he leads the areas of Digital Subscriptions, Consumer Insights, New Product and Audience Development, and the 365 Benefits Program. With twenty years of experience in the media, he previously served as Chief Customer Officer at Clarín, being in charge of the areas of Subscription Sales, Customer Relationship Management and Big Data & Analytics.

Industrial Engineer graduated from the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), with an MBA from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, he has started his professional career in the US financial market.

During her tenure at The New York Times, Sasha Heroy has built proprietary advertising platforms, products and formats, and has also overseen the integration of numerous vendor technologies. Today, she leads the teams responsible for the planning and execution of ad products across the Times’s digital properties and transaction channels. Following a series of successful contextual targeting product launches, her team recently facilitated the transition of advertising campaigns from third- to first-party data with a suite of more than a hundred proprietary, high-quality audiences.

Phoebe Connelly is Senior Editor, AI Strategy and Innovation for the Washington Post, leading the Washington Post’s efforts to employ generative AI and other emerging technologies in service of the Washington Post’s mission to inform, empower, and delight its readers. Previously, Connelly served as Director of Next Generation Audiences at The Washington Post. In this role, she oversees a team focused on accelerating The Post’s reach among younger and more diverse audiences through new products, practices and partnerships. Prior to that, Connelly served as deputy director for The Post’s award-winning video team where she oversaw daily and breaking news coverage, managing a staff that produced more than two dozen videos daily. In that role, Connelly pioneered The Post’s presence on Twitch, experimenting with live video coverage of major news events to reach and engage new audiences. She was part of the team which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

As the President, New Ventures at Axios, Fabricio plays a pivotal role in steering the expansion of a media company dedicated to making people smarter, faster with news that matters. Serving on the Board of Directors at Axios and as a trusted member of the Board of Advisors at Giide, his commitment to shaping impactful ventures remains unwavering.

Edward Hyatt is an audience development expert specializing in SEO. He has a recognized career in SEO for news publishing, having worked in both the US and UK, where he has played a major role in digital transformation at legacy print media. He joined The Wall Street Journal in 2019 as the sole SEO Editor and is now their Director of Newsroom SEO, where he provides strategic leadership in the Audience Reach team.

In his five years at The Wall Street Journal, Edward has helped revolutionize their approach to digital journalism. Edward consults on emerging technology and SEO, including artificial intelligence, and champions SEO and subscription-based news products.

Claudia is the director and co-founder of the independent investigative media outlet Cuestión Pública. She is a multi-award-winning Colombian investigative data journalist and media entrepreneur. She has been certified in public narrative and leadership by Harvard University and holds a Master’s degree in Economic and Social Development Studies from the Sorbonne University of Paris. Claudia has received numerous awards for her work, including the King of Spain Awards, Sigma Awards, Inter-American Press Society, WAN-IFRA Latam, Trace Prize, and Simón Bolívar Award. In 2019, the United States Department of State honored her with the Alumni Impact Award. Claudia played a key role in creating the National Center for Historical Memory’s comprehensive database on the Colombian armed conflict. Her journalistic work has been published in Cuestión Pública, France24, El Espectador, El Tiempo, and ProPublica in the United States. Before her journalistic career, Claudia worked in multinational companies in France, the United States, and Mexico, performing commercial and financial operation analysis.

Gastón Roitberg is the Managing Editor, Multimedia at LA NACION (Argentina). Licensed in Sciences of the Communication of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), technical in journalism (TEA) and Master in journalism (UBA), with postgraduate in Journalism Management and planning (UBA). He has a specialization in digital business (Udesa). He was reporter and editor at Editorial Perfil (1996-2000), Content Manager from AOL Argentina (2000-2005). He’s a Professor at the Master in Journalism of LA NACION and the Torcuato Di Tella University, and co-author of the books “New challenges of journalism” (Ariel, 2014) and “Disruptive journalism” (La Crujía Ediciones, 2015). He currently presides the LATAM Committee of WAN-IFRA.

A journalist, entrepreneur, consultant, and executive producer with a specialization in Audiovisual Branded Entertainment, Fernanda Menegotto boasts two decades of experience in the creative industry. She has been at the helm of pioneering long-format projects that have garnered awards, in collaboration with international brands such as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Enel, Uber, Repsol, and Casa Hunter. Fernanda founded FMM, a consultancy dedicated to innovation in the audiovisual market, and co-founded Vbrand, a strategic hub for Branded Entertainment under the auspices of the InPress Group and Omnicom. Many of the branded entertainment projects she has conceptualized, led, and produced have been aligned with global causes, such as rare diseases (“Living is Rare” Season 1 and 2 on Globoplay), HIV in Generation Z (“Deu Positivo,” 4 seasons), and ocean conservation (“The Life of Corals,” upcoming release).

Ismael is the Digital and Editorial Director of National Geographic España magazine, part of the Grupo RBA. He is the author of the book “The Reinvention of the New York Times” and editor of the weekly newsletter Tendenci@s on the latest digital media trends. Ismael Nafría is a journalist, writer, editor, consultant and speaker specialized in digital media. He was journalist in residence at The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at University of Texas at Austin for the 2016-2017 during which he wrote his book on the NYTimes, his fourth. He was the Digital Innovation and Content Director (2011-2016) at Grupo Godo and deputy editor at Prisacom, the Internet company of Grupo PRISA (2005-2008) . He has led several consultancy projects for media companies worldwide and is the author of three other books on journalism and digital media. He’s also a jury member for many of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Awards worldwide.

With more than 40 years of experience in the journalism industry, her vision focuses on maximising the value of information. She has played a fundamental role in overseeing the preservation and digitization of Peru’s most important historical archive, with records dating back to 1839. Since October 2022, she has held the presidency of the Latin American Council for Accreditation of Education in Journalism and Communication (CLAEP). In addition, she serves as an advisor to the Consulting Council of the Press Unit of Grupo El Comercio and has actively participated in various commissions of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP/IAPA), including Diario de la Educación, Awards and New Members. During the period 2014-2019, she was a member of the Latin American Consultative Committee of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN-INFRA). Her dedication extends to writing. She is the author of “A Few Days with Bobby”, a story for children that explains the disease of cancer and understands it from the fantasy of childhood and co-author of three books.

Alexandra Moraes serves as Deputy Managing Editor at Folha de S.Paulo, a position held since 2021. She has previously led the Diversity Program and drove inclusion initiatives within the newsroom. Folha has remained the top-selling and most influential newspaper in Brazil since the 1980s.

Selymar Colón is an award-winning journalist. Colón spent the 2020 academic year as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Before her fellowship, she served as editor-in-chief of digital news at Univision, where she built a team of multimedia journalists and drove the network’s digital integration. A digital pioneer, Colón championed the use of social media in the newsroom and created the first team of multimedia news producers to incorporate digital-only videos into the company’s news strategy.

Her honors include Emmy Awards, a Gabo Award for Best Image, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. She also led her team to win several National Press Photographers Association awards and a World Press Photo for best Digital Video, among others.

Cecilia is currently Head of digital content at La Diaria, a Uruguayan media company. At La Diaria she worked as editor of Politics and Education. In 2020 she received the Marcelo Jelen National Press Award. She holds a degree in Communication Sciences from the Universidad de la República (Uruguay).

He is currently CEO of Editorial Televisa, the largest Spanish-language publishing company in the Americas, which operates 9 multiplatform brands and 4 digital-based brands.

He has more than 20 years of experience collaborating in the most important digital newsrooms in Mexico: Cultura Colectiva, Grupo Reforma, Grupo Imagen, El Universal and Televisa.

He has been successful in launching, developing and advising projects in the digital media ecosystem, achieving profitability and expanding their sources of revenue and monetization.

Haydée Bagú is News Partner Manager in Google’s LATAM News Partnerships team, She’s responsible for the relationship with News publishers, media outlets and local associations in Mexico and Colombia. She majored in Marketing at Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico City, and has a Master in Business and Technology by Collective Academy. She has worked in Marketing, Communications, News and digital media for the past 18 years in global companies like Coca-Cola, Publimetro and Ogilvy&Mather.

Déborah Friedmann is Editorial Coordinator of the newspaper El País (Uruguay) and a journalist specialized in health and science.
In recent years she has developed digital transformation strategies, artificial intelligence projects, newsletters and podcast products. With a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences and a diploma in Latin American Studies, she has taken numerous courses abroad, including at Harvard University, the New Latin American Journalism Foundation and the National Cancer Institute. She also teaches at the University of Montevideo and is a consultant.

Juan Sudarsky has been immersed in the Latin American media ecosystem for 16 years, occupying roles in radio, print and digital media as commercial and digital director, in VICE Colombia and in media and communications agencies, being director of business planning for Mindshare. He joined Caracol Radio as marketing director in 2019, and CMO of Prisa Media Colombia in 2023.

Juan holds B.A.s in Journalism and Sociology from NYU, and an MBA from Universidad de los Andes.

Adriana is an experienced journalist with more than 25 years of experience in leading Spanish-language media. She has actively participated in the digital transformation of Clarín, where she is currently deputy editor-in-chief and deputy chief of the Society section. She was part of the launching of AGEA’s products such as the sports newspaper Olé and Clarín’s local newspapers. She has a degree in Journalism from Instituto Grafotécnico in Buenos Aires, and has taken training courses in editing, leadership and health journalism at Fundación Carolina, Instituto de las Américas, Georgetown University and the National Cancer Institute. She is also a radio columnist and develops training programs in strategic content and personal branding.

María Noel is a journalist, specialized in audience development, content and product management. She is currently part of Clarín’s audience, subscriptions and marketing team. She actively participated in Clarín’s digital transformation where she collaborated with the different teams of the organization to achieve a product focused on audience acquisition, retention and loyalty. With more than 20 years of experience in media, she has been a mentor in sustainable business model development programs, trainer and consultant in several digital projects. She has collaborated with organizations such as WAN-IFRA, ADEPA, FOPEA, SembraMedia, IWPR and Fundación Gabo, among others.
Before joining Clarín’s subscriptions team, she worked at Infobae as head of audiences.
She holds a degree in Communication Sciences from Universidad Católica de Uruguay and is a Marketing Analyst. She holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Universidad de San Andrés and a Master’s Degree in Communication Management in Organizations from Universidad Austral.

Patricia Valli, journalist, Economics editor at El Cronista newspaper in Argentina and a reference in economics and gender issues.

Argentine journalist and editor, based in Peru. She is Editor-in-Chief at OjoPúblico. She has written for Latin American and European media on human rights, health, science and culture. Between the years 2019 and 2020, one of her reports on the water crisis in Lima received editorial support from the Center for Sustainable Development Goals for Latin America.
She was part of the winning team of the Inter American Press Association’s 2021 Award for Excellence in Journalism, in the category Internet News Coverage. In 2023, she was one of the 30 Latin American professionals selected for the “Women in News” program of the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and Google News Initiative. Co-author of the books “Latinoamérica se mueve” (Hivos, 2016) and “Vacunagate” OjoPúblico, Aguilar, 2021).

Con más de 16 años de experiencia en el mundo digital, Berenice ha desempeñado roles clave en diversas áreas. Durante 2 años, lideró un equipo de Desarrollo de Negocios, donde trabajaron en la expansión y consolidación de relaciones comerciales. Durante 5 años, se especializó en la Automatización de la Monetización, abarcando áreas como Programática (Display, Video, Audio, OTT y CTT, y TV), así como en plataformas como Facebook y YouTube, además de trabajar con datos y contenido. Durante 4 años, se enfocó en la planificación estratégica y en el rendimiento de estrategias, operaciones en programática, buscando optimizar el rendimiento de las inversiones. También, por 5 años, trabajó en Ad Operations en el Mundo Digital, colaborando con empresas como Imagen Digital, Microsoft MX, Grupo Expansión y Metroscubicos.com. Actualmente trabaja de la mano con equipos editoriales para la producción de contenidos monetizables, y la medición comercial a equipos editoriales.

Su enfoque siempre ha sido la búsqueda de oportunidades de identificación para aumentar los ingresos basados en la disponibilidad de stock. Esta orientación estratégica le ha permitido desarrollar un enfoque integral para maximizar los resultados comerciales en el entorno digital.

Deputy Director Iberoamerica (LATAM, Spain and Portugal), WAN-IFRA

Mar has a degree in Communications and is passionate about board games, soccer, concerts, travel and digital marketing. With more than 8 years of experience in technology companies that connect brands and agencies with Enterprise media, she has proven her ability to build strategic and solid partnerships with publishers throughout Latin America.

She began her career at DAZN Group as Account Manager, where she developed her skills in relationship management and financial analysis to support product and territory profitability. She then joined Taboola as Enterprise Publisher Account Manager, working closely with leading publishers in the region to help them promote their content and monetize their websites. During her time at Taboola, she assumed leadership roles as Senior Enterprise Account Manager and Enterprise Publisher Sales Manager LATAM.

Currently, she holds the role of Publisher Partnership Director for Mexico and Central America at Seedtag. In this role, Mar is committed to developing strong strategic partnerships with publishers to optimize their revenues and maximize their reach in the digital market.

Mar’s professional career has been characterized by her ability to build strong client relationships, her analytical skills to identify opportunities for improvement, and her leadership in initiatives to drive diversity and inclusion in the technology industry.