I suppose some theorist or PhD student in communication sciences must be preparing, or will soon be, a very dense work on the increasing presence —and influence— of crime reporting in the current information diet. Dark, confusing, unpredictable, bizarre, violent days, all in all. To a large extent, crime reporting has been exonerated by what we might call conventional or mainstream media from the bad reputation that preceded it. Traditionally, crime reporting was a genre that, in itself, constituted almost a synonym for sensationalism, scarce or null reliability, nosiness, and low intellectual level.It is no longer like that. Now black chronicle is justified by its “informative interest”, and because it is supposed that —according to some— when practiced with quality and rigor, black chronicle “illuminates” aspects of reality that usually go unnoticed by chroniclers of society, politics, economics, or even culture. It is an argument imported from the supposed sibling of black chronicle in literature, which is the noir novel, to which a social content is recognized that often, in effect, it has. However, concepts like quality or rigor always remain pending definition, and that which journalism and literature (and cinema, photography, and painting) do have in common is overlooked, which is the point of view. That a journalistic chronicle, or a novel, has “social content” in itself is a fact that says nothing: what is decisive is the point of view, the focus from which this social content is worked. What do you want to explain with that story, and with what intention.In any case, in times of fierce competition from so-called traditional media against new digital media and the pseudomedia of garbage journalism to capture the public's attention, the disputed and disoriented and fragmented attention of the public, stunned and at the same time hyperstimulated by continuous scroll reading and by the multi-screen bombardment, what the crime genre brings is the capacity to attract an audience. Nosiness is always successful, morbid curiosity also is, and crime reporting provides these ingredients in any quantity desired. We have therefore proceeded to lift the ban on "good" crime reporting, so that it is no longer confined to spaces specifically dedicated to this type of content, but is also incorporated into other programs, or sections of programs: magazines, talk shows, and even news programs. Because we have already agreed that crime reporting is of journalistic interest.There is no longer any need to be ashamed of it: it has prestige and is well regarded, however uncouth it may still be. Turning on the TV or radio and finding the video of Isak Andic stumbling and falling to the ground a few months before he died, or the recording of his son Jonathan tearfully calling emergency services in a state of shock, is apparently a matter of public interest. Or of true vicarious embarrassment: it depends, as we said, on the point of view.

Carles Porta premieres this Monday the new season of his successful Crims. The true crime returns with eight episodes linked by a common thread: deception. Betrayed trust, false appearances, or poisonous lies are central to the seven new cases – there's a double episode – that will begin to unfold every Monday after the Telenotícies. The first episode is titled The pandemic murder, and its synopsis reads: “A serial killer operates in the streets of Barcelona using any object they find as a weapon. No one knows where he hides. No one knows when he will strike again”. The channel has not provided prior information about which other cases will be covered.

First published in 2007, The red parts It is the chronicle of the trial of a case reopened thirty-five years after it remained unsolved: the murder of the author's aunt, something that, without having directly affected her when it happened, because she had not even been born yet, had always hovered like a ghost over the family, who could not find peace knowing that the murder of March 1969 was still at large. But Maggie Nelson is an author who is both too powerful and too subtle. to write only A legal chronicle: the book delves into intimate details of her childhood and youth, marked by other losses, pain, and a growing sense of bewilderment, and also rises into theory by proposing a series of highly pertinent reflections on the reasons for the collective obsession with the violent deaths of women. These three paths—chronicle, autobiography, and essay—intersect here and there, seemingly without order, on every page of the book, organically, as only a highly skilled hand knows how to orchestrate. And indeed, the author ofThe Argonauts, the book that would catapult her to fame a few years later —or, at least, as one of the icons of a new way of writing autobiographical essays— she was already successfully demonstrating here how to move elegantly and radically from literary theory to a small white box containing the remains of her deceased father's bones. This audacity comes naturally to her, and she masters literary tools with ease. If, in addition, the translation is impetuous and playful, as is the case here, the text becomes as captivating as the original.