Yesterday, while walking through Buenos Aires, the journalist, teacher, cultural activist and entrepreneur Mario Tascón died suddenly, due to a cerebrovascular accident. He was sixty years old. He was in the capital of Argentina to give a talk to journalists about artificial intelligence, one of his many intellectual passions. The only, minimal, consolation of his unexpected farewell is that it surprised him while he was doing what gave him the most pleasure, spreading knowledge, and he was doing it in the city with the most bookstores in the world.
Born in Ponferrada in 1962, teacher of the Gabo Foundation, former president of the Fundación de l'Espany Urgent, winner of the 2022 Internet Award for personal career, Tascón's most visible professional resume points to him as one of the pioneers of digital journalism and infographics in Spain. He was an entrepreneur in the noblest sense of the word: he founded several projects that paved the way for the transformation of traditional media into 21st century platforms.
After graduating in Teaching, at the age of twenty-two he created the weekly Bierzo 7, the first publication in Spain to use a Macintosh for its layout. Then, following the lives of so many other brilliant Galicians of the last century, he made the leap to Madrid to, during the 1990s, manage the infographics area of El Mundo and found its digital editorial office. Between 2000 and 2008 he directed the contents of the digital area of Grupo Prisa. And in 2010, with María Moya, he founded Prodigioso Volcán, one of the best Ibero-American communication and strategic advisory agencies, which has won several international awards in design, infographics or digital events.
But Mario Tascón has been more than a pioneer and an entrepreneur. Your less visible resume is just as important as your audience. He has devoted an enormous amount of energy to cultural mediation, to the translation of worlds. Not only in large media and as an advisor for large companies and government bodies; also for all citizens, neighborhoods and screens. In Fundéu he promoted the manual Escribir en internet. And with Prodigioso Volcán he managed to make the web pages and the graphic and textual language of many public institutions follow the principle of clear communication. Because words and their messages are level 0 of democracy. And they must be cleverly designed so that they radiate simplicity.
The corporate and institutional world was for him, above all, a space of opportunities to feed the cultural machine in which he believed. He generated and supported projects for the pleasure of contributing to the dissemination of good ideas. He put his team to work on initiatives that did not always bring financial benefit, but which enriched the lovers of books, good exhibitions or new narratives on the internet.
His last personal project may have been the exhibition Fake news. The factory of lies, which he curated for Espacio Fundación Telefónica de Madrid. A journey through the falsification of news from ancient times to today, with a bold design that is strictly contemporary. It can be visited until November 19 and becomes part of his legacy.
Classic and viral, literal and virtual, he was an extremely curious person who traveled through the two dimensions of the present. The last time we saw each other was a few weeks ago at the Edita Forum in Barcelona, where he gave a talk about independent bookstores. Before the summer we met at Culture
One of the many who drove Tascón, a key figure not only in the digital transformation of this country, but in communication and translation in the broadest and noblest sense of both terms.
