Aire Y Luz: The New Buenos Aires City Blog

The Buenos Aires city government has started up a new blog. It’s called Aire y Luz and it is remarkable because of what it represents. The blog, which is run by my friend Alejandro Rozitchner, as well as Marcos Peña, Laura Ojeda, Federico Suárez and others, allows the city to communicate “directly and informally” with residents. If you want to know what the city is doing and why it is doing it, check it out.

You may have read in Clarín or La Nación about Mayor Mauricio Macri doing this or that. But if you want to know why he’s doing what he’s doing, he’ll tell you in the blog. The blog consists largely of video interviews with city officials, including Macri. It is informal. The site is simple and unvarnished. The interviews (in Spanish) are straight forward and conducted with Flip Ultra video cameras, which are uploaded straight to YouTube. In a decade as a journalist writing about politics in Argentina, I have never seen anything like it.

Beyond that, there is something refreshing about the way city officials make themselves available in the blog. Their approach to communication contrasts starkly with that of the national government, which often displays distaste for people who want to learn more about why it does the things it does.

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