The semi-clad girls gracing the cover of Super Notícia, the Brazilian tabloid newspaper, are considerably more glamorous than its grimy headquarters in an industrial suburb of Belo Horizonte.

The paper’s figures are similarly eye-catching – in May it sold an average of 293,178 copies a day. Belo Horizonte is in a city of just over 2m people, in a country where 17 per cent of the 187m population are classified by the United Nations as “functionally illiterate”.