The desmenjòmetre

The appearance of the website called Menjòmetre, which allows for easy quantification of subsidies and other public income for a company or entity, has generated some criticism from journalistic media. It is accused of favoring the populist discourses of the far-right and of creating confusion by mixing the turnips of canteens with the cabbages of essential contributions if one wants to maintain culture or the third sector. I don't find these criticisms unfounded, but I do find that it's like running headfirst into trees while looking for the forest.

Although the technical explanation of the project states in bold that the score obtained “indicates no irregularity, misuse, or moral judgment on the entity”, it is evident that a name like menjòmetre invites demagoguery and criminalizes subsidies indiscriminately. Now, having said that, the application should be seen as a useful tool that journalism can rely on to work with and add value, context, and rigorous framing. My profession has led me down other paths in journalism, but I still remember, leaving university, at La Marxa de Osona, reading the printed edition of the Diari Oficial de la Generalitat every afternoon, to see if anything promising appeared among all the administrative paraphernalia. How I would have loved to be able to perform searches without having to go through that hell of bureaucratic prose with my finger and stuck to the pages… Applications of this kind allow saving time by sifting through official advertisements, often incomprehensible, to do the real work: to verify and explain it to the citizen honestly and precisely. In the end, journalism must row in favor of transparency, including its own, and assume that AI speeds up work but increases self-demand. Criticizing what, on the other hand, is inevitable can end up seeming like an exercise in complacent corporatism and lead us to score high on the desmenjòmetre.