The 'Avui' and Pujol's true diary

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the newspaper Avui, which emerged from a campaign that today we would call crowdfunding and was then called the acquisition of co-partners: private individuals who put in money without expecting dividends or editorial control. El Punt Avui has commemorated it with a supplement of those hefty tomes where the bulk of the right-hand pages are institutional advertisements and on the left, in this case, there is a multitude of interviews with people who were present at the beginnings of the newspapers. I will stick with the interview with Jaume Guillamet, one of the most brilliant minds we have on Catalan press matters. He was deputy director of Avui and the passage of time allows him to openly explain Jordi Pujol's role in the newspaper. One of the questions is: “Did what Lluís Foix says about Pujol interviewing himself in La Vanguardia happen at Avui?”. And Guillamet replies: “I remember a call one day when Maluquer wasn't there. President Pujol is passed to me and dictates an editorial about the Loapa to me”. These are things that are also explained by the fact that the chairman of the board of directors of Avui was, at the same time, chairman of the parliamentary group of Convergència i Unió. However, despite this clear desire to manage the editorial steering wheel, the emeritus professor recalls that Pujol's newspaper was not actually that one, but rather El Correo Catalán. That is the medium he bets on, putting money into it and investing personally, while the other is left to the mercy of the little capital – however heroic it may have been – of the co-partners.

Despite everything, the lesson is that little by little one goes further. El Correo closed in 1985 and Avui –even as a brand integrated within El Punt– somehow survives after years of uncertainty in which it was simultaneously owned by Grupo Godó, Planeta, and the Generalitat. It matters little whether it was half a century ago or now: newspapers are always sustained by their readers.