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Features
9 June 2024 2.00 h

MIQUEL BERGA

Chief Editor of Catalonia Today

“Seeing so many people reading it was wonderful”

“We ’read’ the world from a Catalan perspective, but we present it in English to expats and Catalans alike”
How did you first hear about the Cat­alo­nia Today pro­ject, and how did you get in­volved in it?
Well, I had known Car­les Puigde­mont for a cou­ple of years be­fore he ap­proached me in order to ask for my help in the launch­ing of his new pro­ject: a free Eng­lish-lan­guage daily news­pa­per in Cat­alo­nia. As the di­rec­tor of the Casa de Cul­tura in Girona at the time, he had pre­vi­ously asked me to cu­rate an am­bi­tious ex­hi­bi­tion on the fig­ure of Eng­lish writer George Or­well in his cen­te­nary year, in 2003. It seemed a pleas­ant and rather sur­pris­ing ini­tia­tive to me as it came from a mem­ber of Jordi Pujol’s po­lit­i­cal party, where a so­cial­ist like Or­well could hardly be con­sid­ered a lu­mi­nary. How­ever, I liked the way that Car­les Puigde­mont (I be­lieve he is a very well-known name these days) ap­proached me about the ex­hi­bi­tion, which he wanted to be am­bi­tious, pro­fes­sional and with no con­cep­tual in­ter­fer­ence. As it hap­pened, the ex­hi­bi­tion was quite a suc­cess in Girona, Sant Cugat and Barcelona. So when he told me about the Eng­lish-lan­guage news­pa­per I was nat­u­rally in­clined to get in­volved. After all, I was teach­ing Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture at UPF [Pom­peu Fabra Uni­ver­sity] and was the chair­man of the major as­so­ci­a­tion of Eng­lish teach­ers in Cat­alo­nia: it made sense to me. I be­came a sort of ad­vi­sor with an ac­tive role in the se­lec­tion of Eng­lish jour­nal­ists liv­ing in Cat­alo­nia and in set­ting up an ini­tial com­mit­tee to en­dorse the pro­ject, which in­cluded the likes of jour­nal­ist Mònica Ter­ribas, pro­fes­sor An­dreu Mas-Colell and even my friend Jon Snow, the well-known TV jour­nal­ist and an­chor of Chan­nel Four News in the UK. Every­thing started with a lot of pos­i­tive en­ergy.
What was the phi­los­o­phy and the main goal of the pro­ject?
Ba­si­cally, there were two main con­cepts. One was re­lated to the idea of a ’free’ news­pa­per that would guar­an­tee a large cir­cu­la­tion (I re­mem­ber that for months it was quite usual to see peo­ple read­ing the paper on the buses or the un­der­ground. A won­der­ful sight!). And a large cir­cu­la­tion would at­tract ad­verts, and so on. The other idea be­hind the pro­ject was twofold: to give Cata­lan is­sues pro­jec­tion through the com­mu­nica­tive po­ten­tial of the Eng­lish lan­guage and to cre­ate sig­nif­i­cant, mean­ing­ful con­tent in Eng­lish for Cata­lan speak­ers. And to do so on a daily basis!
What was so­ci­ety like at the time, and was it a good time to launch an Eng­lish-lan­guage news­pa­per?
I thought so. The idea of hav­ing such a pub­li­ca­tion at the air­port, in the coun­try’s ho­tels, in our schools, and so on, looked like some­thing of real value that would be more than wel­come in many sec­tors of so­ci­ety.
What was the hard­est thing about get­ting the pub­li­ca­tion up and run­ning?
Well, the snag was that our pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions did not wel­come the pro­ject with the sort of fi­nan­cial en­thu­si­asm that we had ini­tially ex­pected. I de­tected as­pects of sec­tar­i­an­ism in the at­ti­tude of some that were per­haps wary of the jour­nal­ist Car­les Puigde­mont as a mem­ber of Con­vergència Democràtica de Catalunya, the party of Jordi Pujol. On the other hand, 20 years ago, there were few in­flu­en­tial politi­cians run­ning the in­sti­tu­tions that had enough knowl­edge of Eng­lish to re­ally un­der­stand the con­tents of the paper. With some ex­cep­tions, it was hard for one rea­son or an­other to find nat­ural al­lies where it mat­tered.
Why did the pub­li­ca­tion un­dergo so many changes in its early years?
As a re­sult of fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, and the ef­fects of the eco­nomic cri­sis of 2008, we had to make ad­just­ments to re­duce costs, and we lost the main strength of the paper, which was to have it as part of the daily news in the Cata­lan com­mu­nica­tive sys­tem. It was turned into a weekly and, even­tu­ally, it sur­vived as a monthly with the help of the El Punt Avui media group.
At the time, did you ex­pect the pub­li­ca­tion to last 20 years?
I don’t think we were think­ing about things like that at the time. Our con­cern was to reach the widest pos­si­ble read­er­ship. We were very ac­tive in pro­duc­ing con­tent in Eng­lish for the am­bi­tious new pro­ject of El Punt TV. We pro­duced the se­ries ’The Class’, made by very tal­ented peo­ple, which fea­tured sto­ries for chil­dren in co­op­er­a­tion with the British In­sti­tute of Barcelona, as well as talk shows in Eng­lish.
How do you think the so-called ‘death of the printed press’ might af­fect the mag­a­zine in the fu­ture?
I be­lieve our monthly mag­a­zine has be­come an in­ter­est­ing and valu­able prod­uct with an em­pha­sis on cul­ture and the arts in Cat­alo­nia, but also cov­er­ing the main po­lit­i­cal de­vel­op­ments in the coun­try. We keep on pro­vid­ing a per­spec­tive of our chang­ing mul­ti­cul­tural so­ci­ety in the Eng­lish lan­guage but pro­duced by jour­nal­ists who live and work in Cat­alo­nia. We ’read’ the world from a Cata­lan per­spec­tive, but we pre­sent it in Eng­lish to ex­pats and Cata­lans alike using a rich va­ri­ety of con­trib­u­tors. Some­how, the found­ing spirit of Cat­alo­nia Today is still very much pre­sent in these pages. Times are not easy for the printed press, as every­one knows, but we re­tain some sin­gu­lar fea­tures that, hope­fully, will help us to make it through the com­ing years.

in­ter­view 20th an­niver­sary

Life of an anglophile

Alongside his role teaching English literature at the Pompeu Fabra University, Miquel Berga chaired APAC (Catalan Association of English Teachers) and was VP of the Catalan PEN. He is also an author who has published extensively on George Orwell and other Anglo writers associated with the Spanish Civil War, such as John Langdon-Davies, whose biography he wrote in 1991. He later edited and translated Nancy Johnstone’s accounts of the Civil War, a project that led to his most recent book, “Un país estranger” (A Foreign Country). Catalonia Today’s Chief Editor, Berga is also a regular columnist for the El Punt Avui newspaper.

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