Thursday, June 27, 2024

Reflections from our CEO on 10 years of Mexico News Daily

I would like to take a moment to thank all of our readers and reflect on 10 years of Mexico News Daily.

Over these past 10 years, MND has published over 16,000 articles on news, business, politics, culture and more, to give you a front-row seat to Mexico. Our team is deeply committed to helping positively contribute to the future of Mexico. We believe in the very bright future of the people and the country, and we are certain that we can have an important impact on that future by providing balanced news and information and inspiring informed and objective debate.

This will bring better economic and political decisions, which in turn will bring more investment and confidence in the country. And that will lead to better outcomes for everyone — better education, better healthcare, better infrastructure, etc.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 65% of new businesses fail by their tenth anniversary, and in Mexico, reportedly 75% of small businesses fail within two years of launching. I am sure that the percentage is even higher for media companies like MND. So with that backdrop, our team wants to celebrate this milestone and take a moment to share with you why we think what we do is more important and more relevant than ever.

We are living in dynamic times — to say the least. We are all struggling with an information overload, and the frustrations of having to sort through a highly polarized and often ultra-opinionated news feed. As I spend an average of 4-5 hours per day reading news from throughout Mexico, the U.S. and the world, I must say I am increasingly shocked and saddened by the state of the news today. Most mainstream media outlets don’t even attempt to present an unbiased, balanced perspective in their coverage of Mexico.

To make matters worse, it has become far too easy to scroll our way through Facebook, Instagram or X feeds to get our “news.”  The problem is, as we know, it often is not news, but opinions — and usually highly divisive ones that we get “fed.”

We increasingly don’t even understand why we are even being shown the stream that we get.

Just recently, Jack Dorsey, the remorseful founder of Twitter, expressed how conflicted he felt about his creation and said: “Five companies are building tools that we will all become entirely dependent upon. And because they’re so complicated, we have no idea how to verify the correctness, we have no idea how to verify how they work, or what they’re actually doing.”

He went on: “Because people have become so dependent on it, it’s actually changing and impacted the agency we have. We can resist it all we want, but it knows us better than we know us, because we tell it our preferences implicitly and explicitly all of the time, and it just feels super dangerous to continue to rely on that.”

We at Mexico News Daily are deeply concerned about the world Dorsey describes, which arguably is one we already live in.

We are a team of 50+ passionate, motivated and inspired professionals committed to Mexico — committed to providing our readers with the best platform to learn about this country and its people.

Our team has a culture of doing the best we can to bring you objective reporting on the news and allow you, the reader, to come to your own conclusions.

We are not perfect at this, but it’s important for you to know that we take the issue very seriously and work very hard at it.

I guess you could think of us a little bit in a Star Wars context…we are The Resistance. The Resistance to being told what to think. The Resistance to being told how to think. The Resistance to being told what to read. The Resistance to media outlets that prioritize click-bait over real news. The Resistance, as Dorsey said, “to being programmed” by the media giants.

Here’s to another 10 years of MND and beyond! We feel that we are just getting started and have lots of great improvements coming soon. Thank you for being a reader and please support us by becoming a paid subscriber.

Travis Bembenek is the CEO of Mexico News Daily and has been living, working or playing in Mexico for over 27 years.

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