Few journalists treasure an experience like that of Màrius Carol (Barcelona, 1953), who has held all the positions on the ranks, from when he started as an intern at El Noticiero Universal until he was director of La Vanguardia between 2013 and 2020, passing before by the newsrooms of El Correo Catalán, El Periódico and El País. His latest book, Historias de la canallesca (Avant-garde Books), collects several episodes lived in all those places, and is a love song for the trade, tinged with a sense of humor and sprinkled with global reflections on the profession.
What has he intended?
It is my vision of journalism, but not a theoretical reflection but using my own career. 50 years ago, I joined El Noticiero as an intern at the age of 18... and, since then, I have been seeing how things changed. The newsrooms were full of smoke, there were no women, there was an enormous noise from the typewriters and teletypes. Today, look around you, the newsrooms are silent, they look at you badly if you raise your voice, it seems that you have entered the cathedral of Chartres. Before, in the middle of the La Vanguardia newsroom there was an excellent bar where they served you alcohol. There was also a priest, who buried us, blessed the children and put up with the wild things we said.
With what image of the writing of El Ciero... do you stay?
With that of deputy director Ángel Elías, who suddenly opened the door of his office, took the newspaper like this, as if it were a cape, stared at José Domínguez, the head of layout, and gave a couple of little jumps inviting him to the charged with a scream. Then Domínguez got up quickly, took an Olivetti on his metal cart with wheels, with the line pin as an improvised horn, and charged him. Elías stretched out his arm, the bull passed a few centimeters while he gave three naturals and a chest pass that provoked the excited 'Oleeee!'. of the writing. You can imagine my stupor at witnessing this every day at the age of 18.
Another memory?
The one about José Antonio Lorén, the editor who followed Espanyol, who always asked for information about the nightclubs, was granted and after a few days he had hooked up with an Egyptian contortionist... I came across that journalism, very bohemian, with editors who played poker and, fed up with being thrown out of the premises, they bought themselves a bar, which I attended a few times. Today, journalists seek to reconcile and telecommute, before they never had time to go home. Today they are more upright, sensible and familiar.
In El Correo Catalán the owner was Jordi Pujol...
Then a banker who was preparing to assault (with the force of the votes) the Generalitat. He did not want us to interview Josep Tarradellas in exile. But, taking advantage of the fact that one day the director was not there, I went with Toni Rodríguez to Clos de Mosny to screw up an interview with La Vanguardia that was going to be published on Sunday. He told us: 'I will fight whoever stands for election without claiming my return.' Pujol called us to give us a terrible rant. I remember that, while, with the pen, he was removing the cerumen from his ears, he did that a lot, it was a Chaplinesque gesture.
He tells an anecdote with Jesús de Polanco, the editor of El País.
Once he came to Barcelona and asked to go to Sant Andreu, a neighborhood where he had sold books in his younger years. He was looking for a specific bar, a bodega, and asked the older waiter if they still served those sardine sandwiches with tomato bread that had restored his strength thirty years ago. They prepared it for him and with that humble morsel he experienced a Proustian moment of authentic happiness.
It is a book that can create vocations, because it reflects a fascinating world.
Sometimes it seems that this is a job for bad guys, for unscrupulous guys, that's why I end it with a phrase from Kapuscinski: 'You have to be a good person not to be a bad journalist'. I have tried to be. This job, as Tom Wolfe said, is full of low-voltage satisfactions: shaking hands with the mayor, going through the restricted access fence, the signature itself... That sometimes causes journalists to suffer from an excess of arrogance, an ego inflated, but still you have to be a good guy, rigorous, independent and honest.
And what future do we have?
La Vanguardia explained the Fets of October 6, 1934 in its edition of the 11th, now it is the opposite, there is a passion for the immediate that sometimes damages journalism. More than immediate journalism, we should do quality journalism, which is expensive but the media that bet on it will survive. How can you trust information merely from social networks, so full of trolls and all kinds of characters? What gives credibility is a prestigious paper header behind it, which feeds information in any format, and that is why The New York Times website has 9 million subscribers.
