By Sebastián Lacunza
Editor-in-Chief Sebastián Lacunza on recent dramatic events
Shortly after midnight on Sunday, January 18, a colleague asked me if “what the Herald journalist was saying was serious.”
That is how I first heard about the now-famous tweet that Damián Pachter sent out into the world: “Alberto Nisman has been found in the bathroom of his Puerto Madero home in a pool of blood. He was not breathing.”
I immediately contacted Pachter, a writer for the Buenos Aires Herald’s website, while his immediate editor did the same.
Shortly after midnight on Sunday, January 18, a colleague asked me if “what the Herald journalist was saying was serious.”
That is how I first heard about the now-famous tweet that Damián Pachter sent out into the world: “Alberto Nisman has been found in the bathroom of his Puerto Madero home in a pool of blood. He was not breathing.”
I immediately contacted Pachter, a writer for the Buenos Aires Herald’s website, while his immediate editor did the same.
We asked Pachter to write a short piece collecting the information while the two of us, alongside an editor from Ámbito.com and another from the Herald newspaper, attempted to confirm the news with other sources. When it was confirmed that the news was pretty much as the reporter had tweeted, we published a short article on the Herald’s website at around 2.30am — it goes without saying, accompanied by his byline.
Nobody slept that night. The next day I congratulated Damián for his well-placed trust in a source that allowed him to release a piece of news that was likely to be the biggest of his professional career. I also told him at the time though that these types of stories should be shared with the media outlet for which he worked — both for the good of the outlet itself as well as for his own professional prestige, which would have been enhanced even further if the information came from an article accompanied by his byline, rather than a tweet.
Damián, who had a day off on Sunday, offered his own explanation but understood my view. I emphasized the point that on a historic day like Monday, his place was in the newsroom. Later, as tired as he was, Damián understood my insistence.
I asked Damián to write an article about his experience of those early hours. His name was already circulating on websites and in newspapers around the world. The article came out the next day in the Herald and was began on the front page under the headline, “When a trusted source provides an unexpected scoop.”
Starting with those early hours of Monday morning, we began a week in which we had much greater amount of contact than we had previously enjoyed with Damián. The BuenosAiresHerald.com operates under the digital content branch of Grupo Ámbito, while I run the Buenos Aires Herald print newspaper. We work with some degree of coordination but there are two separate management structures, which is why I only had occasional dealings with Damián previously, compared to my close work with the journalists who work in the newspaper.
The BuenosAiresHerald.com reporter who first broke the news of Prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s death displayed some signs of stress as was to be expected from a young journalist dealing with a sudden deluge of attention. In addition to this very particular situation, and with the Nisman case dominating the headlines, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner gave our newsroom, which is composed of a small team, additional attention when she mentioned one of our front pages in an open letter she posted on Facebook.
That Thursday (January 22), Damián seemed to be calmer. At 7.30pm I had to leave the newsroom for a few hours and we talked briefly about the website. A while later, according to what was known on Saturday, Damián would leave the newsroom after learning of what he considered to credible information that his life was in danger. He had previously talked with the Herald’s news editor, Daniel Politi, during which he expressed his anger at an incorrect quote in a cable from the state-run news agency Télam. (The agency claimed Damián had written on Twitter that Nisman was dead, when he had actually written that he wasn’t breathing.)
The next day, I inquired about his absence. The director of the Grupo Ámbito online editions, Pablo Jiménez, managed to speak with Damián on Friday afternoon. Pachter told him he was going to see a doctor. Finally, around 2pm on Saturday, we saw a story pop up in Infobae.com, written by former BuenosAiresHerald.com staff member Adrián Bono, who told the story of how Damián had left the country fearing for his life. At that moment, the sequence of events that is now all too familiar to everyone began.
Certain voices, even some respectable figures, believed that the newspaper had “abandoned Damián Pachter.” I want to be emphatic on this point: Damián did not tell his editors or his newsroom colleagues, not even those colleagues who were closest to him, that he felt scared or that he was being followed. I do not criticize at all his decision to stay quiet and go to a colleague from another media outlet. A person who feels afraid has the right to choose whichever path he or she sees fit. I’m recounting this necessary information so everyone can understand the situation fully.
The Herald is a newspaper that is committed to the fight for human rights. We have contact with organizations of every kind, from the most pro-government supporters to its fiercest critics. Their voices appear in the newspaper almost every week, and if we had any sign that Damián was feeling threatened by the intelligence services, we would have quickly notified this network of voices, demanding his protection.
Once I learned he had left the country I talked with my colleague Adrián Bono from Infobae, who had accompanied him to Jorge Newbery Metropolitan Airport. Hearing his version of events, I was relieved to learn that if Damián was threatened like he had perceived, then he was no longer in danger having left the country. I am sincerely happy that he feels safe in Israel.
As part of the fall-out from this turn of events, certain people have been claiming over the last few days that the Buenos Aires Herald is a “K” newspaper. I am convinced that this declaration can only be made if based on disinformation or a deliberate desire to misrepresent the publication. I have no better answer to this claim than to suggest that anyone that is genuinely interested should buy the Herald for an entire week, or consult our archives or use Google to search for past headlines, articles and editorials. They will easily find articles that are critical of the government and all types of power. I would go so far as to say that the diversity of columnists the Herald has is unheard of in Argentine journalism.
In any case, the central issue is that Damián was not abandoned either by his colleagues, his direct editors nor the newsroom of the newspaper I run. The Herald is a small, diverse and dignified team.
@sebalacunza