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.

“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.

You may have noticed, I hope you've noticed, that I haven't posted for a while. That's because we haven't been in or around Culebrón for a long couple of weeks. Indeed we went for a remarkably enjoyable cruise around the Baltic from Southampton. The boat spent a lot of the time at sea and so, for days and days, we were without affordable Internet access unless you consider £80 for a couple of weeks WiFi to be reasonable. Once back in Spain it's taken us a while to get back onto an even keel. (Sorry).

The majority of the passengers on a Fred Olsen Cruise Ship do not have jobs. They have sizeable pensions instead. So, the very Anglo, second question of, "And what do you do?" isn't much use to pigeonhole individuals in an Orwellian, doctor good, shelf stacker bad, sort of way. It was substituted instead by the "Where are you from?" question. I suppose Huddersfield scores fewer points than Berkshire but I don't think it's as reliable an indicator. As an aside Spaniards very seldom ask what you do after they have your name. Instead they ask about your family, your food tastes or whether you like Spain. There doesn't seem to be the same need to peg your status.

It was a small boat and we were soon on nodding terms with dozens of people. We engaged in lots and lots of conversations with lots and lots of people. When we were asked where we lived we told the truth and so we'd get questions about weather, about food, about house prices or about bullfighting. Without doubt though the favourite question was what the Spanish think about Brexit.

I noticed that, when we were answering those questions, Maggie and I have different perceptions of some things Spanish. It has never crossed my mind that I will die anywhere other than in Spain whilst Maggie envisages a possible return to Albion. Apparently we have different ideas about everyday things like how clothes fit or how long the winter lasts too. On Brexit though we seemed to be in agreement. In our experience the Spaniards who live here don't think very much at all about Brexit. It's not an important issue on the street. It's there on the news from time to time but it's not a big item or a long item or a headline item. For your average Spaniard any question to a Briton about Brexit is more a demonstration of good manners than a question with an interesting answer. To be honest it has a similar status for me. What the Spanish authorities decide to do to we foreign immigrants after Brexit may cause me problems but the wayward behaviour of a bunch of British politicians a couple of thousand kilometres away is of very little interest. Not that it won't affect me of course. I'm just about to lose my vote in the UK and I'll lose my European and local vote too when I'm no longer a European citizen but..

Anyway it's good to be home. Every time I go back to the UK I find it much less like the place I used to live, which is obvious enough if you think about it. So I'm a little less comfortable each time. Mind you being fluent in English, even if it tends to be an old fashioned English, helps a lot and a couple of weeks of being able to say exactly what I wanted, when I wanted, was very nice.

BTW: The photos of the trip are in the tab just underneath the Life in Culebrón photo.

All the news that's fit to print

We have a splendid little town in Pinoso. I mean splendid. The other day we had David Bisbal here, one of the biggest pop stars in Spain. A bit like getting Ed Sheeran to play Marlborough in Wiltshire. There was a float in the carnival procession complaining about the concert. About 5,000 people paid the ticket price of a bit less than 30€ per head and the event made a profit. The complaint was that the prices were too high, that the audience was outsiders and that the profit went to the Town Hall. I presume if the prices had been lower and the Town Hall had made a loss there would have been complaints about that too.

Sometimes though I do wonder about the way that the Town Hall spends money. The current administration has done a lot to prettify the town. There are arguments both ways. The first is - what a waste of money when we need more (fill in the space s appropriate). The second is - lovely, how nice our town looks. I've tended to the second camp. Pinoso is not endowed with many, any, buildings of note. There is lots on a small scale but you have to know what you are looking for. So, keeping the town neat and tidy and the lights and drains working seems reasonable enough.

The Town Hall runs a radio station, produces a periodic magazine, maintains a Facebook page and has a website. The Town Hall website was tarted up recently. It's now slower than it was, more difficult to navigate and altogether much clumsier than before. Nonetheless at least it gives us a way of dealing with some of those minor admin procedures and it gives us access to information. But not really. Take the news sort of information - events and happenings. There have been a couple of pieces put out by the media team which haven't rung true with me. For instance in Culebrón we have a bit of a fun run and the headline was something like "Even more runners this year" but I remembered differently, I checked and there were, in fact, fewer runners in 2018 than in 2017.  There are little reports too from the local police but there seems to be very little about the break ins that we hear about on the grapevine - I suspect a hint of subtle disinformation - report that a flower pot was vandalised but forget that someone was robbed at gunpoint, because that's not a local police issue, is disingenuous to say the least because of the picture it paints. There was a piece too about how sad it was that the local football team wouldn't be playing next year despite the best efforts of the newly formed committee and the councillors to get the team onto an even keel. The comments on a local forum type Facebook page suggest that the reason for the crisis in the football teams is that the Town Hall has pulled the funding. Winston Smith would be proud of them - rewriting history subtly or not. I could be completely wrong of course. We Britons tend to pick up dodgy information because of our dodgy Spanish or because we choose not to get too involved with our adopted new home. The thing I really don't like though is that when I do try to check I find it more or less impossible.

Now the other day I had a conversation with a Canadian who has lived here for a long time. I was being relatively supportive of our administration and he was less so. The conversation ranged across everything from Education Policy and the use of the local Valencian language to general funding in the town. We had different ideas about where the money was coming from. We both knew that there was local, provincial and regional funding but we had different ideas about how it was being used in Pinoso and how much there was of it. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to one of my students how nice something new was in the town and she agreed but went on to say that the Town Hall only likes to spend money on sexy, vote winning, projects. She lives at the top of a pot holed and tree root damaged tarmac road and that sorting the road out was neither sexy or vote winning. Here in Culebrón I watched the hypocritical annual clean up of the village before our local fiesta. It reminded me of that little story that says that the Royals think that a new paint smell is normal. I marvelled at the piece haranguing local citizens for dumping things beside the rubbish bins which serve the rural areas outside the town. I think they said it had cost the Town Hall 7,000€. I could hardly believe that a Town Hall with a budget of well over 10,000,000€, that happily spends thousands on new flowerpots and railings, was worried about 7,000€ but, even more, I wondered if they'd considered why people had dumped rubbish. Was it perhaps that the communal bins are full to overflowing because they do not have sufficient capacity for the frequency with which they are emptied? Or maybe it's because the town's tip doesn't open at the right times?

One of the selling points of the new webpage was how it allowed people to feedback to the Town Hall and to find "transparency" information. It is possible to make comments on the website but nobody ever answers them. Saying nothing, refusing to engage in a conversation is a remarkably effective way of blocking complaints or questions - it worked in the days of paper forms and it still works in the electronic age. Nonetheless, following on from my conversation with the Canadian I clicked on Transparencia on the Town Hall website. There are redirects to things like budget proposals, income and expenditure predictions, declarations from councillors about their personal wealth and lots more good things. I clicked on a number of links and the message that came back was usually "It seems that we can't find the page you're looking for. Maybe you should try a general search." Other headings led to broken links. In other words either the website isn't functioning or the transparency is a sham. I did try searching and I did find some very basic budgetary stuff there published to the Provincial Bulletin. Stuff like 5,000,000€ in from the quarry and 5,000,000€ out on personnel. That's a lot of personnel for a town of 7,500 people. I'm probably just misreading it all because if those employees were getting the national average pay of 23,000€ that would be 217 staff and there can't possibly be 217 Town Hall staff for a town of around 7,500 souls can there? Oh, and, 23,000€ sounds like a good wage to me. For instance, if I were paid according to the agreements between teaching unions and employers, my annual pay for a 34 hour week would be around 15,000€. Who knows, the information may be there but the website is so turgid, so slow, so laborious, with so many dead ends that I always give up.

And that worries me. The truth is that the Town Hall has tight rein over the flow of information. When we used to have a weekly newspaper, when we used to have a website run by an ex-school teacher it was relatively easy to find alternative and optional points of views; non sanitised information. That's a healthy sort of town, a town that knows how to take and respond to criticism as well as to organise a splendid fiesta and build a new library.

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.

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. 

Bouncing off the ionosphere

I like listening to the radio. Getting your news from the radio obviously has it's disadvantages (no pictures) but radio does have the huge plus of portability and not being attention seeking. The Internet and television are nowhere near as compatible with driving, shaving or showering as is the radio.

Generally radio here is reasonably good. There are stacks of local stations full of local news and stories. Nationally the news coverage is fine with a range of political views spread amongst the various broadcasters though politicians don't get anything like the cross examination that they are subjected to in the US or UK. News aside speech radio doesn't have anything like the breadth of, for instance, BBC Radio 4 (drama, arts, comedy, documentary reports etc)  but with my "Proud to be British" hat on I suspect that very few radio stations in the world do. Sports coverage is enormously important and takes up hours of air time. Sport is synonomous with football though basketball, tennis, Formula One, cycling and golf get the occasional look in.

We have a classic music channel, Radio Clasica, which is a lot like the BBC Radio 3 of yonks ago - a bit highbrow and a bit tedious. There's nothing like Classic FM

Not knowing how to describe it adequately I'll call it pop music. Pop music gets badly treated here. I've said before that the commercial channels tend to play a limited range of songs over and over again: They play far too much dated music (not so much Beatles as lots of "Hips Don't Lie" Shakira) and the playlists change so slowly that you're sure the programme you listened to today has exactly the same content as a programme you heard six months ago.

The state broadcaster has a pop music channel too - Radio 3. A quick look at their website and you can see that they're a bit staid but, then again, it looks hopeful enough. The very first programme I listened to on Radio 3 was playing modern Spanish indie bands and the next had modern world music. Hopeful I thought. Radio 3 does have some good programmes but it also has far too many presenters who prefer the sound of their own voice to the music and they play far too much really old stuff. It also has minority programming like country and western or jazz at peak times.

Now I realise that young people can access modern music in so many ways that radio is not now the key medium it once was. On the other hand the eclectic nature of radio does mean that it can do some of the sifting for you. The radio is on, in the background, you like something, you check it out on Spotify, YouTube, Internet radio or Facebook and then, if you really like it, you download it to your computer or phone and it's yours.

I've been fretting about this for some time now and this morning when I popped into town and some bloke was droning on about some macrobiotic festival in Madrid instead of playing music I decided to do a bit of complaining. And that's what I've just done. I banged off an email along the lines of asking Radio 3 what sort of music policy it has that allows it to broadcast just three 1950s flamenco tracks per hour at ten in the morning - or something along those lines. Actually I should be honest. I wrote an email and then asked a couple of Spanish pals to correct my grammar so that I didn't come across as a fool. It was interesting that they made very few changes but they chose to make my language much more formal.

The website was opaque of course so sending the message wasn't easy and I don't suppose they'll reply but at least it formalises my right to complain.