Folha was founded on 19 February 1921, by a group of journalists led by Olival Costa and Pedro Cunha, under the name
Folha da Noite. It was an evening newspaper, with a project that privileged shorter, clearer articles, focusing more on news than on opinion, and a positioning closer to the themes that affected the daily life of the paulistanos (São Paulo city dwellers), particularly the working classes. The paper was competing against the leading newspaper in the city, which represented rural moneyed interests and took on a conservative, traditional and rigid posture; Folha was always more responsive to societal needs. Business flourished, and the controlling partners decided to buy a building to serve as headquarters, a printing press and then, in 1925, to create a second newspaper,
Folha da Manhã. Also in 1925,
Folha da Manhã premiered
Juca Pato, a cartoon character drawn by Benedito Carneiro Bastos Barreto (1896–1947), better known as
Belmonte. Juca Pato was supposed to represent the Average Joe, and served as a vehicle for ironic criticism of political and economic problems, always repeating the tagline "it could have been worse". The two
Folha newspapers criticized mainly the Republican parties that monopolized power back then; the newspapers campaigned for social improvement. The company was involved in founding the Democratic Party, an opposition group. However, in 1929, Olival Costa, by then sole proprietor of the
Folhas, mended his fences with the São Paulo Republicans, and broke his links to opposition groups connected to
Getúlio Vargas and his Aliança Liberal. In October 1930, when Vargas led a victorious revolution, newspapers that opposed him were attacked by Aliança Liberal supporters. Folha's premises were destroyed, and Costa sold the company to Octaviano Alves de Lima, a businessman whose main activity was coffee production and trade.
Defense of rural landowners and opposition to Vargas Alves de Lima's initial goal, when he took over the newspapers in 1931, was defending the "agricultural interests", meaning rural landowners. But important events elsewhere became the focus for news organizations: the
1932 constitutionalist revolution, when São Paulo tried to recover the power lost to Vargas; the
World War II (1939 to 1945), and the
Estado Novo (the Vargas dictatorial period that extended from 1937 to 1945). Alves de Lima had no news experience, and so he charged poet
Guilherme de Almeida with directing the company, and chose Rubens do Amaral as newsroom head; Amaral led a newsroom staffed by journalists hostile to Vargas. Hermínio Saccheta, a
Trotskyist who was briefly a political prisoner under Estado Novo, became an executive news editor as soon as he left jail. The dictatorial administration put political pressure onto news organs, and in São Paulo it took as its main target the daily
O Estado de S. Paulo, a major supporter for the 1932 revolution. The newspaper's director,
Júlio de Mesquita Filho, was arrested three times and forced into exile, and "Estado" was under intervention by the authorities from 1940 to 1945. With its main rival muzzled,
Folha da Manhã took a leading role in voicing opposition to Vargas' dictatorship. This critical stance is one of the reasons offered to explain a change in ownership during 1945. According to João Baptista Ramos, brother of João Nabantino Ramos – one of the company's new controlling partners, with Clóvis Queiroga and Alcides Ribeiro Meirelles – buying the Folhas was a maneuver Getúlio Vargas engineered to get rid of the oppositionist viewpoint Rubens do Amaral, a sworn enemy of "getulismo", gave to the paper's news coverage. Queiroga, on his part, represented Count
Francisco Matarazzo Júnior, barred from owning press outlets in Brazil because he was born in Italy. Matarazzo financed the purchase of new, modern printing presses and saw the investment as a way to respond to the attacks he suffered from newspapers owned by his business rival
Assis Chateaubriand. One of the weapons he developed for this battle was reducing the sales price of the Folhas in order to suffocate the business of
Diários Associados, Chateaubriand's company. However, the ploy backfired. Nabantino Ramos balanced those losses against the Count's initial financing and, some months later, declared that the company's debt to Matarazzo was fully paid and took over editorial control of the papers. in which the newspaper challenged the notion that there were people jailed for their political ideas in Brazil. The editorial was also a response to rival "O Estado", for its defense of a special jail regime for political prisoners. The editorial claimed: "It is well known that those criminals, whom the daily [Estado] wrongly qualifies as political prisoners, are just bank robbers, kidnappers, thieves, arsonists and murderers, acting sometimes with more exquisite perversity than those other, lowly common criminals, that the media outlet in question thinks deserving of all promiscuity". The episode also caused an internal crisis. One week later, the newspaper suspended its editorials. Later that same year, Cláudio Abramo lost his position as newsroom head, and Folha would only claim back a more avowedly political stance, instead of the uncritical "neutrality" adopted when editorials were suspended, late in 1973. More innovative than its competitor, Folha started to gain hold of the middle classes that were growing under the Brazilian "economic miracle", and became the newspaper of choice for young people and women. At the same time, it put effort into news areas that were not well covered in Brazil up to that time, like business news, sports, education and services. Folha supported the concept of a political opening and opened its pages to all opinion trends, and its news coverage adopted a more critical stance. Frias believed in a nonpartisan and pluralistic editorial policy, able to offer the widest range of views about any subject, and he found a skilled collaborator in Cláudio Abramo, the newspaper's editorial director from 1965 to 1973, followed by
Ruy Lopes (1972–73) and
Boris Casoy (1974–1976). Abramo took over once again in 1976/77, but then a crisis caused by an attempted military coup against President
Ernesto Geisel led Frias to bring back Casoy. Abramo reformulated the newspaper and led the first of many graphic reforms that would follow, in 1976; he hired columnists such as Janio de Freitas,
Paulo Francis,
Tarso de Castro,
Glauber Rocha, Flavio Rangel,
Alberto Dines,
Mino Carta, Osvaldo Peralva, Luiz Alberto Bahia and
Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Folha became one of the main forums for public debate in Brazil. Contrary to some expectations, this editorial posture was preserved and developed by Casoy during his tenure (1977-1984). In 1983/1984, Folha was the main bastion for the
Diretas Já movement, an attempt to change the voting system adopted for presidential selection, from a Congressional vote to direct popular voting. In 1984,
Otavio Frias Filho became the editorial director, systematizing and developing the newspaper's experiences during the political opening and Diretas Já. A series of documents circulated periodically, defining the newspaper's editorial project as part of the so-called Projeto Folha, implemented in the newsroom under the supervision of Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva and
Caio Túlio Costa. The guidelines for Projeto Folha require critical, nonpartisan and pluralistic news coverage. Those principles also guide the
Newsroom Manual, first released in 1984 and updated several times later on. More than a style guide, it serves as a guide to the rules and commitments Folha works under. It was the first publication of its kind to be made available to the general public. The guidelines stipulate that Folha's journalism should be descriptive and accurate, but that themes that cause controversy can admit to more than one viewpoint and require a pluralistic treatment. Folha also became known for its highly diverse selection of columnists. At the same time, checks and balances were instituted through internal controls: the Manual, the daily "Corrections" section adopted in 1991, a rule stating that objections to any article expressed by readers or for people mentioned in the news should be published, and, above all, the
ombudsman position created in 1989; this position entails job security for its holder, whose aim is to criticize Folha and deal with complaints by readers and people mentioned in the news. From the midpoint of the Brazilian military rule, Folha kept a critical stance towards several succeeding administrations (
Ernesto Geisel,
João Figueiredo,
José Sarney,
Fernando Collor,
Itamar Franco). Otavio Frias Filho was sued, with three of Folha's reporters, by then President Fernando Collor. Although Folha expressed support for Collor's liberalizing economic views, it was the first publication to appeal for his impeachment, which finally came in 1992. The newspaper's coverage about the administrations of
Fernando Henrique Cardoso (
PSDB) and
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (
PT) led to accusations of anti-governmental bias in both cases, though the two Presidents belong to rival parties. Beginning with the exposure of a massive fraud on the Norte-Sul railway (1985), and through the
Mensalão scandal (2005), Folha kept revealing abuses and misrule. In 1986, Folha became the newspaper with the largest circulation among big Brazilian dailies, and it still leads today. In 1995, one year after reaching the landmark of one million copies for its Sunday edition, the company put into operation its new printing center, seen as the most technologically advanced in Latin-America. The company's circulation and sales record was set in 1994, with the launch of the "Atlas Folha/The New York Times" (1,117,802 copies for the Sunday edition.) Currently, Folha extended its range of communication activities, with newspapers, databanks, a polling institute, a newswire, a real-time news and entertainment service, a printing company for magazines and a delivery company. In 1991, all shares of Empresa Folha da Manhã then belonging to Carlos Caldeira Filho were transferred to
Octavio Frias de Oliveira, Folha's publisher until his death in 2007. Folha's executive editors since 1984 have been journalists Matinas Suzuki (1991–1997), Eleonora de Lucena (2001-2010) and Sérgio Dávila (from March 2010). ==Technology and innovation==