Journalists from Oaxaca serve an audience in the U.S.

Victor Ruiz and his wife, Olga Rosario Avendaño, are the publishers of a website that offers news about the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Victor says that their website, called El Olor a Mi Tierra (The Scent of My Homeland), has a large audience in the U.S. and in the metropolitan area of Mexico City.

The site gets 3,000 visitors a day, most of them from outside of Oaxaca. Many residents in their home region of Oaxaca, a relatively poor state, leave home to find work and want to find out what´s happening back home.

El Olor a Mi Tierra publishes news about town festivals and local people as well as coverage of politics, the environment, human rights and immigration.

A community service

Victor and Olga started thinking about starting their own web page during the elections of 2000, when they saw how foreign reporters were sending their stories back home by email. They themselves were still relying on a fax machine to transmit their stories.

Using their own money they paid a web designer about $300 to set up their page, bought a web domain for $75 and got started.

Today they are generating about $1,000 to $1,200 a month in ad revenues from governmental and nonprofit organizations, enough to cover their modest expenses. Their office is in their home in San Sebastian Tutla. They´re breaking even.

Victor and Olga earn their living as correspondents for international news agencies such as Agence France Press and EFE of Spain as well as newspapers such as El Universal of Mexico City.

Often the big news organizations will use only a few paragraphs of the stories, so Victor and Olga publish the rest on their website. They generate much of the content but sometimes will pay a correspondent 100 pesos (about $7.50) for a story or a photograph.

Both Victor and Olga have participated in the courses offered by the Center of Digital Journalism at the University of Guadalajara so that can hone their skills.

Their news service is a good example of how digital journalism manages to link people across the border.