I have to admit I didn’t see this one coming… traditional media corporations in Latin America are launching news sites based exclusively on content originated in social media.

First of all, we have 140 – news of Twitter, a new web site lunched by Perfil in Argentina, intended as a site for “people who don’t have a Twitter account but want to find out what’s happening” in the microblogging world.

Twitter has had a tremendous growth in the country in 2010, thanks mainly to TV shows that sudenly began using Twitter as a live interactive tool with the audience.

Then local celebrities and world-cup football players joined the conversation, finishing the job of popularizing the social network, and now even politicians replace their traditional press releases with fleeting 140 character messages that sometimes end up in front pages.

140 was created by Darío Gallo, executive editor of Perfil.com and former Director of Noticias (the most popular political magazine of the country), one of the early adopters of Twitter in Argentina. He assured me the new project is receiving good reactions and traffic.

The website feeds itself with Twitpics from celebrities, political “debates” or any piece of news that transcends Twitter.

Meanwhile, one of Gallo’s former colleagues in Perfil, Pablo Mancini, has just created a website named ReporTube as a new project from El Comercio of Peru: “A gateway to the portion of the audience that is interested in producing content”.

They already have more than a thousand video reporters in dozens of countries; but it’s not a merely citizen journalism initiative since they see ReporTube more as an aggregation site of audiovisual testimonies.

The creators say that ReporTube is an online news site, under the umbrella of elcomercio.pe, 100% made with YouTube content with a productive model in permanent construction.

“The massive amount of content available led us to believe that remixing and aggregation are concepts that complement participation and quality content that is not necessarily synonymous of original content”, Mancini explains.

Especial thanks to Facundo for helping me with my lousy English.