Joaquín Luna had a vocation as a journalist from a very young age. He also knew that he “wanted to work at La Vanguardia, because it was the newspaper they read at home and also a liberal and profitable newspaper, ideal for having a decent career and not dying of hunger.” It didn’t take long for the young Luna to see his dream come true, because at the age of 24, in 1982, he already joined the staff of the Godó family newspaper. And four years later, at 28, he saw how another of his aspirations, that of traveling, came true when he was granted the correspondent position in Hong Kong.
Luna’s professional life, “which has always been ahead of her personal life”, has passed between the China of the Tiananmen revolt, Moscow that said goodbye to socialism, Washington in the 90s and Paris at the end of the millennium. She has been in a few wars, in soccer World Cups, in the Olympic Games and has also written several books. In addition, he is one of the newspaper’s most controversial columnists.
This afternoon he revealed the secret of his career: “I have never had a no for La Vanguardia,” he explained during a lunch at the Cercle del Liceu hosted by Llucià Homs. With Luna’s talk, the entity chaired by Francisco Gaudier inaugurates a series of conferences on journalism in which the director of La Vaguardia, Jordi Juan, will also participate on April 24.
Luna has told some anecdotes from his time as a correspondent, such as when he managed to be the only journalist in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, at a time of tension with China. “I was able to stay in the country because I had not yet been accredited, but there was no way to send the chronicles until at the hotel I met a man from Barcelona who worked for Tabacos de Filipinas and was a reader of La Vanguardia, I convinced him to come at night called the newspaper and dictated the report, which they then expanded from the editorial office.
That would not happen today, because the Internet has opened the doors of instant information (sometimes less rigorous) on the five continents. But it is not a question of maintaining that any past time was better: “Journalism will continue to exist, but you need a solid company for that and I have been lucky enough to work in one of the best in Europe,” Luna concluded.
