Shortly after starting at my last medium size marketing agency job I had the pleasure of hearing Alberto Cairo give a presentation on Infographics. He helped take what then was a passing interest in infographics into a full-blown passion.

After the talk, I immediately bought and read his books The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Both were incredibly well written, profoundly insightful, filled with useful examples and case studies of what to do and what not to do and generally helped instill in me a passion for visualizing data.

My appetite not yet whetted, I then bought and studied the 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 volumes of The Best American Infographics and signed up to mailers like Information is Beautiful and started reading.

Why the fascination? Simply put, infographics and other means for visualizing data are incredibly useful means for organizing and presenting information that otherwise takes many paragraphs or pages.

Well. Better put, they can be.

After all, all Bugatti Chiron’s are cars, but not all cars are Bugatti Chirons.

When it comes to TeleSUR English’s Infographics not only do they lack any Bugattis in the line up of work they’ve produced, but most of their infographics are better classified as jalopies, scrap metal, or cardboard boxes.

Lest it appear that I’m overly harsh, I’ll review a few examples of the many infographics that have major issues in truthfulness and aesthetics.

TeleSUR English Infographic with Incorrect Information

This infographic, a term I clearly use loosely here because it’s really just a visual news release poorly conceived and executed, amuses me for a number of reasons.

I took a screenshot of this “infographic” to point out how several people that viewed it believed it to be the incorrect date listed on there and thus felt that it reduced their credibility as a news organization.

In TeleSUR English’s defense, this is an understandable mistake.

I’ve worked with enough graphic designers from Latin America to know that this is a typical error when producing based on designs for an American audience.

Similar errors include applying metric measurements, using comma’s instead of periods to indicate decimals and writing “Jaja” instead of “Haha”.

What’s makes this doubly funny is that even then, the date is still wrong.

You can check this on Reuters as well as Greg Wilpert’s Venezuela Analysis.

In addition to these issues, you’ll notice after every period in the list that there is a hyphen.

1. –
2.-
3. –

Why? A full stop has been indicated, so there’s no need for a dash. It’s distracting and unnecessary.

In the places where the copy is gramatically correct, which is few and far between, the word choice doesn’t make sense. The writer of the copy clearly had English as a second language, which is fine, but the editor that approved publication should have checked it first.

TeleSUR English Infographic with Incorrect Information Part II

4 +10 +8 +12+ 26 +12+50= 122, not 185.

TeleSUR English’s Infographic is incorrect, though their source – Global Witness – is not only clear that this number is worldwide, but they also present the data in a far superior manner.

Clicking on the link above or exploring the map below demonstrated far superior means for displaying that data that does not lose credibility because they can’t do simple math.

TeleSUR English Infographic with Incorrect Information Part III

Besides the fact that the infographic is ugly – all of those people they show on there provide don’t assist in interpreting or understanding what is being depicted, but hampers quick interpretation. Then there’s the fact that they miscategorize the Massacre at Wounded Kneww as a “mass shooting” instead of an act of genocide. Futhermore, the one percent figure that’s on there, “31% of mass shootings happen in the US” isn’t contextualized. What they should be including is this in relation to the world’s population – which the United States makes up ~5% of.

Oh, and then there’s the fact that their research didn’t include a number of other mass shooting that other news outlets research teams discovered.

TeleSUR English Infographic That Is Ugly and Stupid

I found this particular infographic to be interesting, though not in a good way.

The first thing that stuck out to me on this – besides the garish blue and red color scheme – was the many percentages.

The five-second rule applies both to food that has fallen on the floor as well as to infographics. Perhaps a small percentage of people can determine what 3.7% is of 58 million, but all would agree that it’d be much easier if this particular number was just placed on the infographic.

Seeing the source, however, was the second thing. See that I knew immediately that not only was this infographic ugly, but that it was stupid. How so? Cause Pew Research understands data and how to visualize it.

In the TeleSUR English iteration, the Latinos just drop into the middle of the United States. Why visualize it that way when you can get even more gradient like the above? Whoever researched for this infographic must have seen it to get the data, but apparently didn’t think to mention to anyone at TeleSUR English that there was a better way of showing it there.

Putting aside the fact that on the same page that lists the data used for this infographic and a few others connected to Pew Research’s report, the data exists elsewhere on their site that can break down Regional Dispersion by country.

 

More than that, the infographic could have contained where Latinx people were and where they were going.

Migration Policy’s South American Immigrants in the United States gives a hint as to how much more useful a well-made infographic can be. Showing migration (new people) instead of (net people) allows them to tell a story about the changing conditions that latinos may be facing.

And let’s face it, these are latino people we are talking about, not latinx. Which is the first thing the people read when looking at the article and is something that a vast majority of people don’t use and is likely to make people want to dismiss it – a feeling compounded by the many percentages discussed earlier.

TeleSUR English Infographic That Is Useless

While I’m focusing on the essential worthlessness of the infographic, I also want to point out that none of the flags on the infographic are correct.

Now when I say that this infographic is useless I mean this in a number of ways.

Additionally worth noting is that ALL of the infographics are not paired with any textual content – be it a news story, opinion article or analysis that TeleSUR English has produced.

What, you may ask could have been shown instead? Excellent question.

If this was connected to some story, for instance comparing the cost of percent THC to price?

 

 

But not, that’s not really all that interested either. Here’s some examples of “marijuana infographics”:

Now I have my issues with this infographic too – it needs a source listed; the deaths per substance at the bottom should be a bar chart; the prohibition cost listed covers all of drugs war spending (though for what year I don’t know) rather than just marijuana so that’s not appropriate either.

But even then this is at least giving some useful information besides an appropriate price to pay a drug dealer.

This chart I really love, which really isn’t a surprise because Statista always produces great work.

***

Despite my criticism of the past four years of the infographics that TeleSUR English’s has produced and the people that signed off on it, there may be a change coming soon.

Earlier today, February 22nd, Patricia Villegas tweeted the following.

While I’m glad that Patricia Villegas has begun multimedia journalism workshops for TeleSUR and TeleSUR Englis at their headquarters in Caracas.

Furthermore, I also wonder what’s happening with the content that they produce – is it going to be disseminated solely for the people present there, or are they going to make this useful information available for free somewhere on there website so that anyone from the Global South can download it and learn it?

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see as to their level of adherence to their stated commitment to those in the Global South. After all, not everyone can afford to spend the money on the books that I have in my quest to master the craft of creating quality inforgraphics.

TeleSUR English is unique in today’s media environment.

Unlike other media news companies wholly or partially funded by foreign governments – such as BBC and Britain; RT and Russia, 24 and France – TeleSUR English is avowedly socialist in its political orientation. There are no red flags or five pointed stars in its masthead to indicate this but it is evident in other ways.

He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune

TeleSUR’s main financial supporter is Venezuela, ruled by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Additionally the non-current event content shared on their social media pages includes quotes and photos from socialists such as Rosa Luxembourg, the Black Panther Party, Patrice Lumumba; people that were sympathetic to socialists like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; and a variety of other socialist related content.

In their About Me section, TeleSUR English claims that they want to be “A space and a voice for the construction of a new communications order” centered around the subject of  “Global South” an allusion to social, political and economic justice.

Why I Decided to Review TeleSUR English’s Digital Footprint

In December of 2017, a few months after I left a job as a Creative Director at a major marketing firm, I decided to make a case study on TeleSUR English that I would later publish on Medium.

To accomplish this I looked underneath the proverbial hood of this modern iteration of a radical newspaper to see what was doing well and what needed to be changed.

My intent in looking at various key performance indicators I’d previously used in the digital media strategy and marketing realm to compare to Russia’s attempt to influence America.

On first look, what I discovered was disconcerting, but as I continued to research, something more nefarious emerged.

Why What I Discovered on Reviewing TeleSUR English Required A Public Report

Why? I’m not sure but I imagine that it has to do with fact that I uncovered at TeleSUR English what looks to be corruption and gross incompetence, if not sabotage.

How do I know this?

Some of the bad stats were intentionally produced to be misleading as to the level of success of TeleSUR English’s operations.

Some of the bad stats were intentionally produced as the person directing operations was either incompetent or is trying to purposely sabotage TeleSUR English’s operations.

Future Historians Will Refer to The First 5 Years of TeleSUR English’s Wasted Money and Opportunities as it’s Lost Half-Decade

If someone should write about the history of TeleSUR English they will refer to it as The Lost Half Decade. Why? Because of how badly TeleSUR English has been directed since its inception in the digital realm. How bad is it? Below is an explanation as to why it happened as well as several examples of the criminal-level incompetency that I’ve discovered.

Worthless Metrics Promoted as Meaningful

In the description on his LinkedIn account, Pablo Vivanco writes the following:

“With a reduced staff and budget, improved metric outreach by over 2000% in under 12 months”

As impressive a number as 2000% is, anyone that’s done any sort of digital marketing, growth hacking or any kind of content marketing strategy will tell you – outreach by itself is an entirely meaningless metric.

Nobody cares about the numbers of emails sent that are never opened; the number of dofollow links placed on low Domain Authority user-generated webpages; or the links posted on websites that are never read, etc. Google, especially, doesn’t care about these.

While this number can be useful in comparison to something else over time – for instance outreach numbers in relationship to A/B testing email headers, only someone that doesn’t have a professional understanding of digital media ecology would self-publicize about such a metric, let alone authorize the spending of tens of thousands of dollars to achieve such a metric.

Key performance indicators that ought to be monitored to track and map improvement include the following:

1. Number of email subscriptions.
2. Genuine number of followers of social media accounts.
3. Genuine engagement level on social media accounts.
4. Domain authority.
5. Brand/website awareness.
6. Number of readers.
7. Reader engagement (i.e. Time Spent on Pages, Number of Pages Traversed, Comments/Shares).

Any person wishing to genuinely understand and track the health of TeleSUR English, or any website for that matter, should be looking at these key performance indicators.

Looking at TeleSUR English’s social media footprint, we can see the shape of such mismanagement.

False Followers on All Social Media

On TeleSUR English’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube Accounts there is ample evidence that many of the people which are “Following” these accounts are not real.

Pablo Vivanco admitted this was true while on the phone with me.

Lacking internal access to their social media accounts and to their internal purchases (to check for “Pay for Followers” services) I cannot say for certain what proportion that this is actually is, but I can estimate and what I can say authoritatively is that they have zero value.

False Followers on Twitter

TwitterAudit suggests that about 80% of TeleSUR English’s followers are real, however based on engagement numbers demographics and the number of people following them that follow over 500 people, I’d say actual people following are about one-half to two thirds of what is actually shown for Twitter. A full report from Twitnomy could easily show me wrong. 

False Followers on YouTube

For the number of YouTube views and subscriptions, I would say the percent of people that are fake to real is much higher.

Given the ratios of ratings of videos, to engagement via comments, to view numbers I’d say that it is likely half of the views and subscriptions aren’t real.

False Followers on Facebook

There’s fewer means for determining false engagement levels on Facebook outside the app itself, so I decided to try an experiment.

After reviewing a number of posts people, I noticed a number of recurring names.

Given many of these people’s profiles were almost entirely not in English, I was surprised. I understand that it’s normal in many places for English to be a 2nd, 3rd or even 4th language – but there was just zero indication other than a TeleSUR English link that it was within there repertoire. As such I decided to send friend requests and message ten people to see how many responded. Out of the ten, only one did.

Now does this mean only one in ten of their followers are real? Certainly not.

What it does mean that someone at TeleSUR English has been paying for follower services, which ought to be categorized as an improper allocation of tax resources.

Interesting to note: What happened shortly after I tried this experiment? Facebook took down the TeleSUR English Facebook page.

***Update 2/11/18***

Because of the above section, I’ve since been accused that I want to “destroy” TeleSUR English. This is simply not true, I simply do not believe that paying for fake followers is a defensible strategy.

Furthermore, I’ve since learned from an internal source that the unpublishing of the TeleSUR English Facebook page was an accident on their part. That they’ve not commented on this, to me, is totally irresponsible and a further example of their willingness to distort the truth for their own narrative gain.

 

Other Examples of Corruption

TeleSUR English has now been in existence for over four years and as a result of their choosing a director primarily for ideological rather than professional reasons, TeleSUR English pursued a number of content ideation, production and digital media strategies that are not considered best practices by YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Examples of Best Practices Not Being Followed

One example of TeleSUR English not following best practices is with its abundance of high production videos that are simply too long.

YouTube and Facebook videos which are most often shared are five minutes and under. While longer format content certainly fulfills a need, TeleSUR English ignores all data-based advice by not repurposing what they’ve already produced into short and succinct segments that are more readily sharable and digestible.

That the above video has only 38 views is both a testament to its length and the bizarre name “Birds of the Apocalypse” that means a person looking for information on “Vulture Funds” will have great difficulty finding it.

Additionally there are the technical mistakes which sometimes require viewers to tell the TeleSUR English staff that the video they are live-streaming is sideways.

Such mistakes happen naturally, it’s only human. However it seems that TeleSUR English has such an abundance of them as the person directing the enterprise simply doesn’t know how to optimize their digital media presence.

Wrong Backlinking Strategy

A well-executed back-linking strategy is an incredibly powerful means for establishing a higher Domain Authority and drawing in readers. However from the above view from Ahrefs we can see that this was not the case.

The strategy which TeleSUR English followed was to take a route that allowed for the wrong kind of data to be presented in fair light rather quickly – “outreach”. Outreach in this instance means putting over a million links on low domain authority websites that has their content generated by users.

Not only does this not constitute an effective strategy, but changes on the content platform could remove all of that effort with a terms of service change or a coterie of committed, computer literature people could remove all of those links.

It’s understandable WHY someone would want to do this – currently some of the top referring pages to TeleSUR English are from Wikipedia, however this doesn’t justify this as a strategy but instead as a reason why to change strategy.

Any government funded institution that spends money on a back-linking strategy that involves people placing hundreds of thousands of links on Wikipedia, Pinterest and GooglePlus is guilty of gross incompetence and misuse of public funds.  

Terrible User Experience Encourages Visitors to Bounce

The above screenshot capture is one of the numerous examples that illustrate the website was not properly designed.

Difficulty browsing frequently causes viewers to leave the page and I imagine that their bounce rate is exceptionally high.

After all, what sort of credibility can you grant to an enterprise that doesn’t know how to properly put the pieces together that allows for the dissemination of content?

Wrong Content Management Strategy

Many of the pages on TeleSUR English lack titles or anchor text. This is a basic and important component of websites. That it’s not there means that there is no Quality Assurance or Editorial staff that knows to include these before publication. That so much of their web content has been posted without this indicated a lack of competency on the work the Director oversees.

No One Is The Reporter

 

 

 

 

 

The brief report I sent to Pablo Vivanco mentioned how in the You’re the Reporter subheading of TeleSUR English there were only five articles and that the last one published was over a year old.

This must have struck a nerve, as a few days later the content therein was deleted while the header remained.

What a telling symbol of the Director of TeleSUR English’s technical incompetence: he can’t even properly delegate the deletion of the entire section – only the content within the section!

Beyond just a symbol of incompetence, what else does this say about Pablo Vivanco’s directorship of TeleSUR English that after multiple years he still hasn’t been able to come up with a means for attracting, retaining and developing talent that wants to write from the perspective TeleSUR English wishes to promote.

Orlando Perez and Pablo Vivanco: TeleSUR English’s Corrupt Leaders

One of the Austrian School’s criticisms of the socialist mode of workplace administration and management is what they see as the tendency for innovation to be lost in production. Why? Those which meekly follow “the Party Line” would take up such a position rather than those that are most meritorious.

While I think that most of this school of thought to be ahistorical and metaphysical – this could explain the reason why TeleSUR, let alone TeleSUR English, doesn’t make it into the top 100 Latin American Newspapers Web Rankings.

Certain personality types, after all, prefer to keep power to themselves and act as a barrier for those that might be better equipped to direct. These are the kind of people that insulate themselves with a coterie of sycophants rather than surround themselves with the type of talent that is continuously striving for excellence.

Now admittedly I do not know much of the history of the people involved in TeleSUR English other than what I’ve been able to piece together from forums and blogs on the internet, but the story which emerged seems to confirm that the Hayek’s concerns have been actualized at TeleSUR English.

There are numerous (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) accounts of TeleSUR English’s difficult working environment and the person who oversees it’s Director, Oscar Perez, has had his fare share of controversy as well.

In 2017 Orlando Perez was fired from El Telegrafo as part of a political change up.  Shortly thereafter he fled Quito, Ecuador for Miami, Florida following his assault on his former girlfriend. After he decided to stop evading arrest and returned to Quito, he held a press conference to explain everything and has since maintained his innocence, but in a highly politicized context wherein working for a leftist state-media publication is seen a mar on one’s resume, this doesn’t really matter.

In an environment where attracting and retaining talent is already hard, appearance matters and it’s no logical leap to say that talented women may be shy of wanting to work in an environment they are concerned about male aggression.

Besides this consideration, there Orlando Perez’s proclaimed political purity and orthodoxy that takes on a sinister tone when it comes to how he views his opponents. After translating several of his articles and interviews (1, 2), I noticed an overlap in our political views. However where he uses abelist language to refer to the “the autistic left” I refer to this group as politically aloof hedonism as I see no reason to insult and alienate potential allies as well as those with mental impairments.

En toto, considering that TeleSUR English states that they want to be “A space and a voice for the construction of a new communications order” centered around the subject of  “Global South” an allusion to social, political and economic justice – it makes me wonder why they would have someone directing the decision-making process considering that clearly alienates so many potential allies and talent.

 

Not being a reporter with numerous articles by and about him, learning about Pablo Vivanco has been more difficult. From what I can tell his experience in digital media starts with him at TeleSUR English and besides the above, which shows that he has directed operations as if it were still the early 1990s and without a thought to the important nuances which make up effective digital strategy, there is little else worth noting.

I admit this is total conjecture, but it certainly seems to me likely that Orlando Perez would want to cover up the extent of Pablo Vivanco’s ability to formulate and enact a digital media strategy based upon the current best practices shared by the social media outlets that TeleSUR English uses.

In the wake of his domestic assault case, this would likely become another reason those in power would want to distance themselves from him and thus he needs it swept under the rug.

***Update 2/11/18***

I’ve received confirmation from a source inside TeleSUR English that confirms my above speculations about Orlando’s insulting, overbearing demeanor. I’ll quote this in an second article in the event I get more feedback.

Why Speaking Up and Out is More Important Than “Keeping it Professional” in This Instance

The reason that I’ve decided to write and publish this assessment is simple: It’s what an honest citizen with professional abilities and integrity would do in the situation – call out incompetence and corruption to help ensure the optimum function of a government institution.

TeleSUR encourages greater transparency in all governmental affairs, no surprise as it was in part founded to counter the lies of corporate media that had a major role in the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chavez Frias.

Ecuador has given asylum to Julian Assange and the governments of all TeleSUR contributors initially a defended Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. While U.S. politicians called these people traitors, seditionists and said that they should be killed without trial – the voices representing The South defended their actions as a service to the world. People have a right, they said, to know the extent of surveillance and espionage that everyday people and various businesses were subject to.

TeleSUR English, however, does not themselves abide by such values as transparency that the governments paying its bill claims to promote. Instead, it replicates an elite-est strand of authoritarian socialism that lies to it’s readers and tells itself it’s doing “good work”.