Spanish newspapers

Even in the analogue days, when a newspaper was something you held in your hands, it always seemed like a lot of work to read one. Nowadays I have a newsreader application that collects news from the Internet. It's not as though I'm a glutton for punishment or anything, I only have three feeds: one for local news, a second for serious news and a third that's a bit more frivolous with the sort of stuff that happens on Twitter or Instagram. Nonetheless the number of articles that turn up each day is simply overwhelming.

A podcaster I listen to, in English, promises to summarise all the Spanish news for me so that I don't need to bother. That's not really true but the podcast does, at least, unpack stories where the detail has often escaped me. Last week, as an extra, the podcast did a bit of background on some of the major Spanish newspapers and the rest of this blog is my recap of that

El País is still the biggest selling (however that is now counted) newspaper in Spain. It's a progressive, centre left newspaper. It's a paper of reference in Spain a bit like the Guardian in the UK or The Washington Post in the US. El País is aligned with the Socialist party, the PSOE and generally it gives the current Spanish President, Pedro Sanchez, an easy ride. The two journos who were doing this round-up of the newspapers repeatedly mentioned newspaper editors. It's very true that newspaper editors are much more like personalities here in Spain than they are in the UK. They often turn up on those political chatter shows which is something a bit alien to us Brits. El País has gone through a lot of editors in recent years. The changes took the newspaper a bit to the right, then back to its traditional position and now they have an ex radio personality at the helm. The changes perhaps, reflect how difficult it has been for newspapers to find their way in the new digital landscape.

El País has an English edition. That used to be a source for Spanish news in English but it has recently changed editor and it now seems to limit iitself to doing a few international stories.

El Mundo, is the number two newspaper in Spain. Like el País it is a reliable source of information. Its politics are centre right. If el País is for PSOE voters then el Mundo is for the centrist end of the Partido Popular. The newspaper had a charismatic founder and editor, Pedro J Ramirez, well known for always wearing braces. He was ousted in 2014. El Mundo blundered seriously when it persisted in reporting that the 2004 Madrid train bombings were the work of ETA rather than Al Qaeda and that mistake still taints its credibility for lots of Spaniards.

ABC is a well established and reliable newspaper. It's a long way to the right, politically, but recently it has been softening its stance a little. That's probably to maintain its place as the party of the Partido Popular and to distance itself from the extreme hard right party Vox.

Vox has its newspaper though in La Razón. Again this newspaper is identified with its editor, Francisco Marhuenda, who is one of the people who gets very excited on those political talk shows, has very strong opinions about most things and has been involved in a number of scandals.

Nowadays as well as the newspapers that have print and digital editions there are some that are purely digital. The digital world has changed though and lots of news is no longer free. Most of the recognisable digital stuff has to be paid for. The most successful digital newspaper is one set up by the man who was ousted from el Mundo, Pedro J. Ramirez. It's called el Español and it is more or less in the political centre with a bit of a leaning towards the right and a very critical stance on Pedro Sanchez's government

El Confidencial is the online Spanish equivalent of newspapers like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. It's apparently pretty reliable in its information but, given its potential readership, it's not surprising that it is right leaning.

The current Spanish government is a socialist led coalition. The junior partner in the government is Unidas Podemos which is a a far left political group which even includes the remnants of the old Communist Party. One of its founders was a bloke called Pablo Iglesias and he is closely aligned to the newspaper Publico. The paper is very left biased and it likes to do those sort of digital stories - what was said on the telly or who is slagging off who on Instagram or Twitter.

El Dario is another progressive, left leaning digital newspaper that has straightforward and usually factually correct reporting. Their pay model is a bit like the Guardian - you can have it for free for a while but expect a deluge of messages asking for money till you give in and pay up.

And last, and least, OK Diario. This is a newspaper that, I am told, never checks its facts and is happy to run with anything that supports the right and badmouths the left. The editor Eduardo Inda is, I am told, loud mouthed and boorish.

Letters to the Editor

When we first got here I used to buy El País newspaper every day. It was a part of my introduction to Spain. El País is a left leaning Spanish daily that came into being shortly after Franco's death. If you were looking for a British political and literary equivalent it would be The Guardian. Although its paper sales have plummeted El País is still the second most read printed newspaper in Spain (after the sports only newspaper, Marca). The digital edition of El País is number one amongst all the online Spanish newspapers.

The newspaper has an English version which I've read for quite a while. About a month ago the English edition started to promote a new weekly podcast called ¿Qué? The podcast is presented by the Editor, a bloke called Simon Hunter. He gave us his Twitter name should anyone wish to comment. I'd enjoyed the podcast so I sent a message to say so. There was a photo alongside Simon's profile picture and I thought he'd done pretty well for himself considering that he looked so young. Later I read his biography somewhere and it says he went to University, in Hull, between 1996-1999. I did the same, went to Hull that is, but in my case between 1972-1975. I suppose that's why he looks young to me.

The podcast is very good. Informal but very informative. It mixes background and story for some of the big news events in Spain each week.

I was skimming through my news feed this evening and I came across an editorial, translated into English, of a story about the moderator/mediator/rapporteur proposed to help the negotiations between Spain and Cataluña. Negotiations between Spain and Cataluña is tantamount to suggesting talks between Cumbria and England but you'll have to take the meaning rather than question the phrasing.

Basically the article pointed out the democratic problems with the Mediator solution. I could tell that the premise was interesting but I had to read it three times, and it was in English, before I could make head nor tail of it. Half the problem was the translation. There had been hardly any attempt to interpret as distinct from translate. Being a bit whiskied up, knowing who the editor was and having his Twitter contact I sent a message. I suggested the piece was incomprehensible and it needed some judicious editing. He came straight back. Understandably, he was defensive. It was all a bit tense. I backed off, he backed off, the phrases softened. I'm half expecting an invitation to the Christmas party

It's pretty cool being able to talk to a newspaper like that. And good on the man for defending his people.

And on 18 April 1930 the BBC said there was no news

Just outside our kitchen door the sun is shining. In fact Culebrón is bathed in glorious sunshine, as it has been for days, but it's just outside our kitchen door that concerns me. That's where I read whilst I drink tea when I have time.

It's nice outside our kitchen door. There are lizards and swallows and blackbirds and wagtails and a symphony of butterflies and all sorts of beasts chirping, chittering and squawking from the hedges and greenery. It's private too, private enough for me to take off my shirt, which is something I would never do in public nowadays. The flabby fat makes me feel unwell and I wouldn't want to scare the horses.

As you may know I do a bit of teaching work. The English classes have been tailing off with the summer. My students, quite rightly, realise that there are more interesting things to do than fight with the pronunciation of island (izzland). But, suddenly, I have an intensive summer course or two to do. Exam courses; exam cramming, grinding through exam papers. The first of them started this week. Three and a half hour non stop sessions on three consecutive days so far. Nice crowd of learners.

So, if I normally tend to read a bit in the morning one of the things I do in the evening is to half watch TV programmes; that I don't care about, and look through the Inoreader news feed on my phone. The news reader picks up stories, in Spanish, from four newspapers. There is also a feed for local news from the Town Hall and a couple of sources of  Spanish news in English from el País and from The Guardian. Because of this and that, probably the football and because the intensive course has sort of moved my day around, I haven't checked the news reader for two evenings. When I did finally looked there were 944 Spanish stories waiting for me plus another 40 or so from the local and English language news. I just deleted most of them. Far too much information.

I read the news because, like most people, I like to know what's going on and because it's one of those things that we all do. I do it too, a bit, to bone up on my Spanish culture. There are thousands of things that we all know because we grew up with them - they seep into our memory, into our shared history. For the first fifty or so years of my life the stuff that washed over me was from a British milieu. That's why I know what Brooklands is and why I know songs by Freddie and the Dreamers and Amen Corner.

So the whole world knows that Stephen Hawking and Philip Roth died this year. Britain knows that Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and John Julius Norwich have shuffled off this mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. Meanwhile here in Spain the death of María Dolores Pradera got a lot of media attention. I didn't have a clue who the actor and singer, particularly famous in the decades around the 1960s, was. It happens all the time. Actors, singers, politicians, institutions, restaurants, towns, buildings. We're still learning them. Malvern, Harrogate and Bath I just know but Mondariz, la Toja and Solán de Cabras I have to learn. The news reader on my phone helps me to do that alongside things like reading novels, watching the telly, listening to the radio, shopping in supermarkets and eating out. On the other hand 944 pieces of information in two days perhaps highlights that, sometimes, it's a bit of an uphill struggle.

Cobbling it all together

Our palm tree is fit and well. You will remember that I was alternately worried about it bringing down power cables or being eaten by beetles. Well everything sort of miraculously self resolved. All I do now is spray it with some deadly chemical every six weeks and that's it. Just another routine job.

I bought the pesticide from the bodega. In their shop they sell all sorts of things for we horny handed sons of toil. Much later I was checking information that I'd heard on the local radio about the the beetle plague with the local environment office. I mentioned my spraying regime. The Park Ranger I was talking to, you could tell she was a ranger because she had those trousers that are baggy behind the knee and have lots of unexplained and apparently useless flaps, asked me if I had a certificate for handling pesticides. I don't of course. No problem she said. Nobody is going to bother you about it but really you should either do the course on how to spray safely or get a professional to treat your tree. As it stands I am apparently on the wrong side of the law if I spray. I remembered her advice when I saw a poster outside the shoe shop advertising a spraying course.

A few weeks ago I was shovelling down some breakfast longanizas and tortilla in Eduardo's when David asked me if I used any chemicals in the garden. He had heard that, from the beginning of October, only people who had been on the appropriate courses about handling pesticides, herbicides and similar would be allowed to buy them. His advice was to stock up before the law changed and that's exactly what I did.

Today as I drove to work I had the local radio on again. This time I heard how the containers for phytosanitary products have to be disposed of in an approved way and that not doing so is a serious offence with attendant fines. Now my guess is that they are talking about the farmers, who spray thousands of litres of the stuff on their crops and then dump the chemical tubs all over the countryside, rather than me and my one litre bottle. The principle, nonetheless, is the same.

It's obvious that something has been going on in relation to agricultural spraying. There was David's news, the conversation with the ranger, the news item on the radio and the training course poster.

To be honest, I have no idea how I kept up with things when I lived in the UK. I suppose it would be a mixture of things - an information leaflet here, a news item there and, maybe, a conversation down the boozer to top it all off.

We, we Britons, don't generally keep up quite so well here. We're disadvantaged because we live on the edge of mainstream society. Most of us don't watch the home grown telly, share the same WhatsApp messages, read the home grown press, live with a Spanish person or even have the same sort of  bar room conversations. Our news tends to be filtered by someone who understood the Spanish in the first place or who has heard it passed on in a sort of Chinese Whispers way.

A few years ago there were sweeping tax changes. Perfectly reasonably the Spanish media centred on those things that would directly affect most people - income tax changes, sales tax changes, pension and salary freezes. In amongst those measures were increased duties on air fares. To your average Spaniard the air fare news was inconsequential but to a retired Briton living in Spain on a pension paid from the UK, paying no Spanish Incom Tax but flying "home" every few months the key bit of information was simply not reported.

So, often, it's not the lack of information that surprises me it's the fact that we somehow manage to cobble it all together one way and another.

Words on a page

Reading is a funny thing. When I worked in the UK I grew to hate reading. I had to wade through so many pages of so much verbiage full of TLAs (three letter acronyms,) where spades were never spades. Nowadays I'm back to reading for pleasure, well pleasure and for the information that reading provides.

I try to read novels in Spanish. Sometimes I can't understand the books I choose but nowadays I can read most novels without too much difficulty. That's one of the reasons that I usually read on a Kindle because it allows me a dictionary for those key words I don't know. Obviously I'm reading the read the book because something about it interests me but there is also a part that is about trying to improve my Spanish through the practice, the vocabulary and the language structures. More importantly though I'm trying to get a handle on the culture. Not culture in the Cervantes or Shakespeare sense - culture in the description of how life was or is, the historical context, the commentary on everyday life.

My dad used to buy the Express. A friend still reads the Daily Mail everyday. Once upon a time a newspaper, a snapshot in time of the news filtered through a politically biased colander, gave us our view of the World. I haven't read a printed newspaper for a while now. I generally read the news on my phone collected through a newsreader app. The app collects local and general news in Spanish. I also read Spanish news in English from both a Spanish and a British source. There are politically divergent slants on the news from the "papers" and a strange national bias between British and Spanish sources. The truth is though that I can't keep up with the quantity of news. The phone app provides about 400 articles a day but Twitter and Facebook add plenty more. My patience threshold is well below that.

My reading habits probably point to some form of psychologically dodgy behaviour. This wish to become more au fait with the place I live. It extends to the books that I have read in English this year too. After reading a Spanish novel about an uprising in Madrid during the Napoleonic era I went looking for another novel about the Spanish Penninsula War or the War of Independence as it's called here. I found one in English and read it without realising that it was part of a series. Like Magnus once I've started I like to finish so I read all five books only to find that book five did not complete the story. Book six is due out next week. I have it on pre-order. I hope that gets Wellington past Vittoria and heading for Waterloo.

I realised the other week that things must be seeping in. Bear in mind that I often forget what it is I went for by the time I arrive in the room. So I am not at all surprised when I cannot remember a Spanish name. It doesn't matter how obvious Gutiérrez Mellado is, as a name, to a Spaniard because names for me are Brown, Smith and Chalmondley. Nonetheless in a couple of chance conversations I was able to come up with the name of a Spanish David Attenborough equivalent, a knapsack wearing, protest singing MP, two Spanish diplomats who saved Jewish lives in the Second World War and a handful of Spanish authors. When a conversation turned to politics I was perming any two names from Manuela, Ada, Cristina, Cifuentes, Colaua and Carmena but my Spanish partners were stumbling too and, names aside, I knew what was going on and why which was surprisingly gratifying despite my stumbling.

That aside I just love it when a book drives me forward. The myriad times when finishing a book becomes a joyous imperative. Those times I can't stop when I should - just a few more pages before I go to bed or to work or whatever. And the way that the same words used  in a shopping list can be used to make poems sing or a novel vibrate is just astonishing. The occasion when a phrase in a book has to be re-read because it has just caused a total surprise. I have to admit that it's a lot easier for me to spot the beauty of a phrase as simple as "at the still point of the turning world" in English than it is in Spanish but I jotted down "sin periodismo serio no hay sociedad democrática" the other day so maybe that's coming too.

The LSC, DfEE and NYB nearly took it off me but not quite.