Thursday, April 19, 2007

A New Daily Newspaper For Spain

Over the last few months I have caught occasional references on the web to a project for a new left of centre daily newspaper in Spain. It now seems that the project has become reality. The companies behind one of Spain's newest TV channels, La Sexta, are aiming to enter the national newspaper market with a completely new daily paper that will be called Público. The new paper will therefore enter into competition with El País, which currently has the left leaning market more or less to itself; at least at national level. It has been announced that the director of the new daily is going to be the journalist Ignacio Escolar, who in addition to his professional activity is the owner of the blog Escolar.net.

It will be interesting to see how someone who has already shown a strong interest in the Internet and digital communications will handle the mixture of the new technologies with the more traditional paper based publication. It's quite a big step to launch a new paid for newspaper these days, the sales of such papers are showing clear signs of decline as they face competition both from the Internet and from the many free newspapers that have emerged in recent years. El País is a good paper, in terms of the news coverage it provides of both national and international events it is clearly the best in Spain; but it will be good for it to have a rival and the launch of the new paper promises an interesting period in the newspaper circulation battle.

1 comment:

Tom said...

Could be good. I'd like a paper which isn't quite as dry as El País but still represents progressive politics.