This text belongs to the newsletter ‘The Director’s Bulletin’, which is sent every Friday morning. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
Good morning,
Much has already been written about the threat of resignation and the subsequent continuity in Pedro Sánchez’s position throughout the week. I admit that I still do not understand the purpose of the operation, although I remain convinced that his allusion to his broken personal situation was not something feigned. All in all, I think that the resignation letter and the drama on Monday have done more harm than good to the prestige of his figure, both in Spain and internationally, and I do not believe that the democratic regeneration to which he appealed will be able to be carried out afterwards. of its strange movement.
In any case, it opened a debate on the media, which is what I want to refer to in this newsletter. The Internet era has facilitated the proliferation of thousands of digital titles. A study by Professor Ramón Salaverria a year ago quantified a total of 2,930 active digital media in Spain. Imagine: almost 3,000! Many of them have nothing to do with what you may understand as traditional journalistic newsrooms. We are talking about newspapers with one or two people in charge, who do not have to be journalists, and, furthermore, in times of artificial intelligence, clone newspapers can be created that make the same type of news with different brands and written by bots. Media that can collect fake news that appears on social networks and distribute it in such a way that what is broadcast seems to have the guarantee of a media outlet. This explains why even a mayor of Madrid, like José Luis Martínez-Almeida, made a mistake and echoed a hoax like the one that Pedro Sánchez had gone on the Falcón plane to the Doñana preserve to rest.
These media can have a greater informative impact thanks to the algorithms of Google, the news search engine, which does not have an informative criterion, but rather limits itself to amplifying what has the largest audience, and that feeds back to the fake content.
To this we must add the tortious use that has been made of some media from those in power. La Vanguardia has reported several cases related to Operation Catalunya, in which fake news has been invented that has been published in certain related media and has then ended in lawsuits. We gave good note of one of the last known cases in our edition on the 26th in a joint investigation by La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es.
Sánchez has dropped these days his intention to make changes to the institutional advertising law, but without specifying anything. It is not a simple issue and it cannot be addressed by political power alone. It is important to have the consensus of the sector and not miss the mark. Criticism of power is legitimate and is intrinsic to the exercise of our profession. We may like a certain editorial line more or less, but it is respectable.
But not everything goes. And misinformation is the worst attack that our democracy is suffering. Therefore, we have homework to do.
And coming down to our daily world of La Vanguardia, we announce a pioneering innovation in the Spanish press. We were the first newspaper to give voice to the news with a system that allows you to listen to all of it at the click of a button. Now we have gone a little further and every day we select ten news items so that you can listen to them all in a row in a playlist format that works like any music platform. And audio is increasingly a system used and required by our audience.
Many Sundays we publish a section called In Continuous Improvement where we explain many of these innovations. It is a great satisfaction to be able to adapt to the demands of readers and use digital tools to do so. You already know, maintaining the spirit and traditional quality of La Vanguardia, but adapting it to new times.
Happy Friday.
