Twenty years of Catalonia in English

Be­gin­nings in the base­ment

Pro­duc­ing the news­pa­per every week­day was a rel­a­tively small team of peo­ple from a va­ri­ety of back­grounds, but mostly na­tive Eng­lish speak­ers with ex­pe­ri­ence in jour­nal­ism, work­ing under Puigde­mont’s man­age­ment. In the early days, the Cat­alo­nia Today staff were based in the of­fices that El Punt – as the Cata­lan news­pa­per was called at the time, be­fore it merged with the Avui news­pa­per in 2009 and that led to the cre­ation of El Punt Avui – used to oc­cupy in Barcelona’s Raval neigh­bour­hood, on car­rer Tàpies, near Dras­sanes. The CT team shared the base­ment with El Punt’s sports writ­ers and the Vi­laweb on­line pub­li­ca­tion, and this is where they would re­main for the next few years.

As the weeks went by, the pop­u­lar­ity of the news­pa­per re­mained strong, but the pub­li­ca­tion failed to at­tract the fi­nan­cial sup­port it had hoped for, whether pri­vate or pub­lic. Cat­alo­nia Today’s Chief Ed­i­tor, Miquel Berga, com­ments on the news­pa­per’s fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion in an in­ter­view on pages 16-17 of this issue of the mag­a­zine. How­ever, the up­shot was that after half a year, there was no other choice than to make cuts. That is when Cat­alo­nia Today be­came a weekly pub­li­ca­tion (Jan­u­ary, 2015). At that point, the free news­pa­per con­cept was re­luc­tantly aban­doned and Cat­alo­nia Today read­ers were asked to pay a euro for their weekly dose of Cata­lan news in Eng­lish, al­though the pub­li­ca­tion began to ap­pear in colour and the num­ber of pages was ex­panded to 48, in­clud­ing thor­ough fea­tures and in­ter­views and the new Re­view sec­tion, ded­i­cated to cul­ture.

Dur­ing this time, var­i­ous mem­bers of staff came and went, in­clud­ing the pub­li­ca­tion’s first Ed­i­tor, for­mer Times writer, Stephen Bur­gen, who for a while af­ter­wards was a part-time con­trib­u­tor to Cat­alo­nia Today. Staff writer Neil Stokes then took over as Ed­i­tor of the weekly news­pa­per for a short pe­riod be­fore the baton was passed to El Punt Avui’s Germà Capdev­ila. Yet the biggest change in Cat­alo­nia Today’s man­age­ment was Puigde­mont’s de­ci­sion to move into pol­i­tics, leav­ing a void that was filled by El Punt Avui. The sup­port of the Cata­lan media group proved in­valu­able for the sur­vival of the pub­li­ca­tion, which today re­mains part of the El Punt Avui fam­ily of prod­ucts.

These changes, some due to fi­nan­cial con­cerns and some due to man­age­ment is­sues, not to men­tion the evo­lu­tion of the media land­scape such in­no­va­tions as the ubiq­ui­tous rise of the in­ter­net, meant that in De­cem­ber 2008, Cat­alo­nia Today reached its de­fin­i­tive form as a monthly mag­a­zine. It still ad­hered to its found­ing prin­ci­ple of ex­plain­ing Cat­alo­nia in Eng­lish and it still ap­pealed to both for­eign res­i­dents and Eng­lish-speak­ing Cata­lans alike, how­ever in four years the pub­li­ca­tion had changed rad­i­cally.

Yet Cat­alo­nia Today had sur­vived and to this day re­mains one of just a few media out­lets that deal with Cata­lan is­sues in Eng­lish. In 2014, Marcela Topor, who had been on the staff from the be­gin­ning, took over as Ed­i­tor of the mag­a­zine, which en­tered an­other phase of its ex­is­tence from its new head­quar­ters in El Punt Avui’s of­fices in Girona.

By that time, own­er­ship of the El Punt Avui media group had changed hands and one con­se­quence was that the group’s Eng­lish-lan­guage op­er­a­tion got a real boost. For ex­am­ple, Cat­alo­nia Today was given pages in Presència mag­a­zine as well as in the back of El Punt Avui’s daily issue to pro­vide a sum­mary of the day’s news in Eng­lish, thereby help­ing to ful­fil the group’s com­mit­ment to reach­ing out to as many read­ers as pos­si­ble, as well as in­tro­duc­ing the mag­a­zine to many po­ten­tial new read­ers.

Our own TV chan­nel

It was at this time that El Punt Avui in­vested in a new tele­vi­sion stu­dio and launched its own chan­nel, which also gave a new out­let for Cat­alo­nia Today’s Eng­lish-lan­guage con­tent. De­spite hav­ing only ever pro­vided writ­ten ma­te­r­ial, CT’s staff and con­trib­u­tors were able to pivot and rose to the new chal­lenge of pro­duc­ing tele­vi­sion pro­grammes in Eng­lish. There was the doc­u­men­tary se­ries ’The Class’, Bar­ney Grif­fiths’ weekly look at the world of foot­ball with a panel of pun­dits, Nicole Mil­lar’s, Marcela’s and Neil’s re­spec­tive se­ries of in-depth in­ter­views with well-known for­eign and Cata­lan fig­ures from all walks of life, writer Matthew Tree’s weekly ex­plo­ration of pol­i­tics with a panel of ex­perts, and for a while Cat­alo­nia Today even ex­per­i­mented with reg­u­lar news bul­letins in Eng­lish.

This pe­riod of ex­pan­sion also saw the launch of the Catchat pod­cast, in which Marcela, Matthew, Bar­ney and Neil would meet every week, some­times with guests, to talk about all things Cata­lan and pre­view the next issue of the mag­a­zine.

Un­for­tu­nately, fi­nan­cial is­sues would again have the final say. In an en­vi­ron­ment of in­creas­ing dig­i­tal dom­i­nance in which con­sumers began to ex­pect con­tent free of charge on the in­ter­net, El Punt Avui once again changed hands and along with many other tra­di­tional news­pa­pers had to re­or­gan­ise to sur­vive. That meant cuts were in­evitable and in scal­ing back its en­tire media op­er­a­tion, Cat­alo­nia Today too was forced to re­duce its ac­tiv­i­ties.

How­ever, the pub­li­ca­tion, for so many years the heart of the Cat­alo­nia Today op­er­a­tion, re­mains. It has sur­vived all the ups and downs and, with two decades of ex­pe­ri­ence under its belt, is ar­guably bet­ter today than it has been at any point in the past two decades, al­though that is for the read­ers to de­cide.

Col­leagues and friends

Whether Cat­alo­nia Today goes on to see 30 years only time will tell, but this is not the first time the pub­li­ca­tion has cel­e­brated a key an­niver­sary. In 2014, the mag­a­zine cel­e­brated its 10th an­niver­sary with a spe­cial edi­tion of the mag­a­zine, much like this one. The photo taken in the Girona of­fices and pub­lished in that issue shows the staff and con­trib­u­tors of the time, some of whom still work for the mag­a­zine. Still Chief Ed­i­tor, Miquel Berga has been in­volved with the pro­ject from its in­cep­tion, as he ex­plains in his in­ter­view, while Marcela, Neil and Bar­ney are still in CT’s main en­gine room. After so many years, Matthew, Mar­tin Kirby, Michael Eaude, Anna Vi­cens and Josep Bosch all re­main loyal con­trib­u­tors to Cat­alo­nia Today, while El Punt Avui’s ex­pert page de­sign­ers are al­ways avail­able to dig us out of a hole if nec­es­sary.

Mean­while, for­mer Ed­i­tor Germà and page de­signer Flo­ren Morante, who for years en­sured the pub­li­ca­tion was pre­sentable and has been ably re­placed by Miguel Fontela, have moved on to other pro­jects, while spe­cial men­tion should be made of those no longer with us. Terry Par­ris, whose inim­itable col­umn ap­peared for many years in Cat­alo­nia Today, and M. Àngels Ribas, who pro­vided es­sen­tial sup­port and li­ai­son with El Punt Avui, are much missed.

In the past 20 years, many peo­ple have con­tributed in one way or an­other to Cat­alo­nia Today, and sadly there are too many of them to men­tion here, as their names could fill the rest of this ar­ti­cle, from the proof­reader Joe Hogan, who was with CT until his re­tire­ment a few years ago, to the for­mer New York Times writer Braden Phillips, who put in many hard yards as the weekly news­pa­per’s Deputy Ed­i­tor, or Aus­tralian writer Brett Het­her­ing­ton, who for many years pro­vided Cat­alo­nia Today with one of its main opin­ion ar­ti­cles. All of these friends and col­leagues have en­sured that Cat­alo­nia Today con­tin­ues to ex­plain Cat­alo­nia in Eng­lish like no other pub­li­ca­tion has or can.