Lusa names Pedro Sousa Carvalho interim information director as newsroom council abstains

Board invites new interim director

The administration of Lusa, Portugal's news agency, invited Pedro Sousa Carvalho to serve as interim information director, the board announced in a communiqué on Friday, 6 November. Carvalho has been the agency's editor-in-chief since 2023. The invitation came on the day the interim leadership team of Nuno Simas and Maria de Deus Rodrigues finished its mandate, a team put in place after information director Luísa Meireles left the post. Carvalho holds an economics degree from ISEG, was deputy director of Público, and has worked at Eco, Diário Económico and Jornal de Negócios, as well as contributing to Expresso. He is also a resident commentator for RTP and Antena 1.

Regulator and the pending appointment

The board said the appointment followed the legal procedure, which requires seeking opinions from the Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social (ERC), the media regulator, and from the newsroom council. Separately, the ERC has yet to issue a binding opinion on the board's choice of Diana Ramos as information director, and the deadline for that opinion was still running on the day of the announcement. Earlier, the board had invited Diana Ramos, until then director of Jornal de Negócios, for the post. The newsroom council issued a negative opinion on her nomination. Two of its members opposed it, arguing that the moment called for a profile with experience in public-service news and that internal solutions could have been found, while three members abstained. In an earlier communiqué, the council also reported that the ERC had validated the legitimacy of the board's nomination of Ramos.

Newsroom council accuses the board

In a statement issued the same day, the council accused the board of exposing the agency to a total lack of governance and said it would abstain on Carvalho's nomination. The council wrote:

“The nomination of an interim information director, after a new information director had been appointed, demonstrates the total mismanagement to which Lusa has been exposed by the Administrative Board.”

The council said the previous interim direction had never been reported to the ERC, and that Meireles remained listed as the editorial person responsible on the regulator's portal. It also complained that the board asked for an urgent opinion less than seven hours before the interim team's deadline and informed the newsroom five minutes later, which it said presented the decision as a done deal. The council described the management as erratic and said it did not want to be complicit in it, which is why it chose to abstain on Carvalho.

Questions on the process

The council's objections rest on the sequence of steps rather than on Carvalho's record. Its earlier request to the ERC asked whether the board had adequate, formal and legal conditions to appoint a definitive information director, given an earlier regulator opinion that raised doubts about the board's compliance with the applicable framework, the European media regulation. Those doubts remain part of the dispute as the ERC's review of the Ramos nomination continues.