There is a much more important argument for subscribing to EL ESPAÑOL than that of “free and indomitable journalism.” Also, that reason is explained much better. Mr. Directorfor whom it is enough, like the Nazarene, to show his wounds. The wounds of the decapitation. Decapitation of the left first and the right later.
You have to subscribe – the above goes without saying and should be requested from any newspaper – because We had a great time here. Unsuspectingly good. Newspapers are like sausages. If you knew what they were like inside, no one would eat them. But this newspaper, without revealing internal editorial issues due to the code of chivalry, can be classified, I attest, as the last of the old ones.
On the outside, it’s digital and that’s all very well. But The journalism of the future will have much more of that of before than of now. And those exciting things from before – the passionate debates, the presence of the bohemians, the creative madness of the director – are locked up here inside and pulsate in the headlines outside.
EL ESPAÑOL has exclusives, interviews, reports, blah, blah, blah. But what it has is a outstanding ability to combat boredom. And that for me is the most important thing: to have a newspaper on your screen every morning that makes you have a good time, that seduces you through unexpected paths. Of playful approaches. Respected syntax.
Since I arrived here, ten years ago, demand has always been embedded in surprise. You have to surprise. And that makes us kill ourselves in the reports, in the interviews and in the chronicles, leaving the most fun thing we find within us.
There are no bad ideas here. Here, it is true, there are sometimes crazy ideas. And we hold each other back while we continue to spur each other on.
It is true when Mr. Director He says that the morning newspaper is the result of a risky debate – sometimes harsh and intemperate – the night before. What comes to your hands, reader, is highly discussed, highly fought over. This is evident in the final plating.
There are boring, silent newsrooms, newsrooms where protocol governs. In this one, there are inexplicable howls, unreproducible jokes, original insults and an atrocious demand, which is what drives us really crazy.
Ten years in EL ESPAÑOL are like a hundred elsewhere. You can ask any journalist who has passed by here, reader. It has its drawbacks, I’m not going to deceive you, for those who row in this galley; but it has enormous advantages for those who, like you, find the already published newspaper in front of a silent cup of coffee.
I propose something to you, dear reader. Before you start reading, put your ear close to the tablet, mobile phone or computer. Hear the roar. I promise you it’s real.
This place is fucking crazy. We are the men and women of Thoureau’s text: we go to the forests because we want to live conscientiously, to live thoroughly, to extract from life everything it has to teach us so as not to discover, at the moment of dying, that we had not lived.
I remember my first day in this place. The director sent me to look for a crazy man who was traveling around Vallecas with a pit bull, intimidating information tables of a liberal party. I was afraid. Me, not the pitbull. As I walked out the door of the newsroom, a veteran told me: “What the director wants is for the dog to bite you and then tell it.”
The dog bit me. Metaphorically. Welcome, reader, let yourself be bitten.