Hairy-tongued holies

The story in El Punt about the priests who have warned that Alt Empordà, with its rich assortment of popular roadside establishments, is becoming Europe’s whorehouse is entitled Sense pèls a la llengua, which means figuratively that they didn’t mince their words and literarily that they didn’t have hair on their tongues. The sub responsible…

Blog and get paid

Check Wired’s Nick Denton piece. What with all due respect I think they haven’t understood is the way that targetted advertising is going to tip the scales away from the traditional media and their silly old ad sales teams. The problem in places like Barcelona tends to be the extreme conservatism of commercial advertisers and…

Newspaper without any news

Check the front page of the Vilafranca weekly, el 3 de vuit, but be quick: they might publish something.

Local press advertising

There are lots and lots of local and regional papers in Spain, many are propped up by the state (the Generalitat has been paying and presumably pulping almost 10% of La Vanguardia’s sales), and most of them have little or no competition. Most will disappear over the next few years because the state is losing…

Press freedom in Catalonia

How have Rafael Ramos, Josep Maria Casasús and other disgraces to journalism been able to survive so long at La Vanguardia? One reason is that the paper’s finely-tuned editorial line resulted in enough favours in cash and in kind from the old Pujol/CiU regional administration to free it from the pressures faced, and the standards…

Victorian paternalism

We already knew from a footnote in Marx’s Capital that the Scottish industrialist Peter Fairbairn, who based his life and business in Leeds and was city mayor, “discovered several very important applications of machinery to the construction of machines as a result of strikes in his own factory.” Now Oxford has digitised a number of…

Virgin skies

Someone pointed out last night that it has hardly stopped raining since Spain elected a leader with no experience in government. This would not come as a such a surprise if people here spent slightly more time sitting in filthy attics reading smelly old newspapers (specifically, La Vanguardia dated April 16th 1929) and slightly less…

Mr Ramos is making it up again

PL just sent me what he believes is a made-up story by La Vanguardia’s plagiarist moron in London, Rafael Ramos, the essence of which is that the City thinks that our new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is just wonderful. There are a number of problems with the article: Various businesses in the City include…

So what about Ramos?

They’ve nailed Jack Kelley of USA Today, so when are we going to hear some news from Josep Maria Casasús on the fate of La Vanguardia’s plagiarising illiterate, Rafael Ramos? (Here he is with some more porkies in the Independent, full text on al-Jazeerah.)

Granada Central Studios

La Granada is a village of about 1,400 people. It’s best known for its satellite dish park, but there’s also a local TV station which, from Central Studios, apparently reaches 5,000 viewers with several hours a day of homegrown material (including Sunday mass live) and a satellite feed: There’s a rather nice walk that passes…