Mariona Ferrer, delegate of ARA in Girona, Carles Rahola prize for best work in press

GironaThe journalist and ARA's delegate in Girona, Mariona Ferrer i Fornells, won this Thursday the award for the best press work in the XVII edition of the Carles Rahola Awards for Local Communication, which recognize the work of the journalistic profession in the Girona region. Instead of awarding her for a single piece, as is usually the case, the jury decided to honor her for the collection of articles presented, three reports published in ARA and one in the magazine Arrels, because they consider that they offer "close-up views built on local journalistic commitment".

The other finalist in the written press category, journalist Carmina Solano i Badia, took home the award for the report The Can Tita crime, more than eighty years of smoke, published in Som del Pont. The neighborhood magazine. It explains the 1943 crime in which a neighborhood merchant killed his brother, burned his body in a sewer, and the smoke came out of the houses. Solano ends speculation and addresses the details.

As for Ferrer i Fornells' articles in ARA, they address city phenomena that are also very global. For the ARA delegate, the selection embodies the type of "plural, calm, analytical, and also investigative journalism that is pursued from the Comarques gironines supplement and the Girona team of ARA", made up of five journalists. At the same time, the fact that "local journalism is done from lived experience, from being there, from listening, and from commitment" is valued, in Ferrer's words.

In this regard, the first selected report deals with language and integration. Titled I don't understand Spanish; speak to me in Catalan, please, seven newcomers to Girona explain their decision to only study to integrate into the city. It is the most read topic in the Girona section during 2025 and it was born from Ferrer's surprise at discovering a cyclist who had just arrived in the city and had decided not to learn Spanish but Catalan. "How many more Lorraine Jarvises were there in Girona?", she asked herself, and the result is a compilation of interviews.

The second has a more analytical aspect and, from an urban planning perspective, but in a very straightforward way of understanding, it breaks down the great barrier of the train station in Girona. What are a thousand ghost parking spaces doing underground in the center of Girona? talks about the two empty parking floors between Parc Central and the high-speed train station, which the Spanish government has no interest in opening in the short or medium term. But using the topic as an excuse, it also breaks down the entire pending transformation under the train viaduct of the land that still belongs to the State and which, during the years of the Procés, has found itself in a dead end.

An investigative piece

And finally, the third report, in this case an investigative one, addresses the phenomenon of the rise of the far-right through social media. In What and who is behind the Instagram account that is already influencing politics in Girona?, it talks about the links with Vox of the young founder of Girona Perduda, a topic that sparked an internal debate at ARA about whether addressing these phenomena through traditional media means amplifying them. In the end, it was considered appropriate to inform readers about a phenomenon that is reproduced both globally and locally.

Mariona Ferrer i Fornells (Girona, 1988) has been part of the ARA team since the newspaper's birth almost fifteen years ago. She worked in the International sections and for more than seven years in Madrid covering political information, where she was delegate from 2019 to 2021. She then returned to the city where she grew up and, as delegate, has given new impetus to Girona's news coverage, both from the Comarques gironines supplement and with the creation in 2025 of the ARA Girona awards.

The Carles Rahola Awards are organized by the Diputació de Girona and the Col·legi de Periodistes. They are an important recognition in the field of Catalan journalism, created to highlight excellence in the media of the Girona region and they value journalistic quality, research, and social awareness.