"I can't imagine the landscape of Catalonia without NOW"

BarcelonaA rainy afternoon, more London than Barcelona, and that's perfectly fine: I've always found something English about the ARA newspaper that makes me imagine newsroom crises like in the movies, with section heads wielding words like "facts" and "sources," trying to combat the tension with phlegm and irony until, when their strength wanes, the true value of journalism returns and everyone gets down to work. And there's also something distinctly English in the humor of Toni Soler, who will be chatting with the editor this afternoon, a sort of Protestant afternoon, thanks to one of the many events with which ARA is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. They both take to the stage, and it's like holding the Sunday paper open at both ends, the editorial in one hand and the back page in the other.

Before the event began, a video was shown highlighting the most significant events of the past decade and a half for the newspaper's subscribers, who filled the auditorium of the Ona bookstore: from Artur Mas to Salvador Illa, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump; it was quite something. Perhaps the ARA reader also shares that British restraint I project in this piece, because there were enough images to elicit a sigh or a laugh, but everyone remained serious. At the same time, Vera made them laugh with her first words: "Excuse me for being late, a bad time for a newspaper editor." The atmosphere was familiar, with that asymmetrical but genuine understanding that develops between those who write and those who read them.

Vera wasn't part of the team that started the newspaper, but Soler was: "These haven't been just any fifteen years." Looking back, Soler finds that ARA was born at an opportune moment to chronicle the great changes that were coming to the world, yet at an inopportune moment due to the crisis in journalism, which will be one of the recurring themes of the conversation. Speaking more as an avid reader than as the driving force behind the project, Soler arrives at a powerful idea in its simplicity: "I can't imagine the landscape of Catalonia without ARA." This naturalness with which Soler and Vera discuss how this newspaper has positioned itself at the heart of the collective conversation, how one has to read ARA to know what's happening in the country, perhaps best summarizes the fruit of these fifteen years: normalizing the fact of having a Catalan newspaper that is perfectly self-centered and at the same time comparable to the highest international standards.

And Vera, as we all knew, gives a romantic speech about the value of journalism. She says that, despite the economic crisis, she is convinced that newspapers are more essential than ever for distinguishing truth from falsehood. With the brutal change in the digital environment of recent years, in which "disinformation is not only free but invasive: it permeates everything," Vera believes that the profession has been irrefutably vindicated: "I think it's good that journalists have been brought down from their pedestals and made more accessible to people through social media, but I'm sure that truth and falsehood can be recognized. We journalists are this: a method."

The idea that resonates with me most, and which demonstrates that they both know how to read against the grain of the times, is that reading newspapers is no longer a way to embitter one's life. Instead, journalism is now the only tool capable of tempering a sense of perpetual apocalypse and helping us understand how to feel about things. Soler explains this very well by turning the old saying "A pessimist is a well-informed optimist" on its head. This saying no longer holds true today because social media promotes "those who never shut up, who announce the end of the world every day, who always use the harshest adjectives, who hurl insults," while only newspapers like ARA are capable of defusing the situation. Vera shares this view: "Journalism is what allows us to weigh things up, to know when to truly worry and when to downplay alarms that have nothing to do with reality." If the fearful and hateful citizen is the one most easily controlled by those in power, then today the democratic function of journalism may have more to do with calming tempers than inflaming them.

Despite the fact that the video featured October 1st, the Las Ramblas attack, and the pandemic, not even during the Q&A session was there a hint of nostalgia: the family of subscribers was more concerned with how the newspaper will attract young readers or what challenges artificial intelligence presents than with reminiscing about old times. Soler allayed the fears of worried parents about their children not reading newspapers by telling them that they would when they grew up; and joked that Jordi Pujol said he wasn't worried about the rise in Esquerra voters because they would mature and vote for Convergència (admittedly, a well-placed anecdote did get a laugh from the audience), and Vera told us that she's working to ensure that, in the digital world, AH is seen as "an authorial source" by a newspaper. We were celebrating fifteen years, but reading newspapers always ends up leading you to commit to the future.