Barcelona“Investigative journalism? Is there another one?”. The appointment of Ramon Barnils presided one more night at the awards ceremony of this group of journalists that honors the memory of one of the country’s leaders, and there are already ten editions. And the journalists Cesc Maideu, Aleix Moldes and Núria Orriols, from the ARA, were distinguished with the award in the national media section for their work in uncovering the parallel structure of ERC which, among others, he ran a false flag campaign against the Maragall brothers using Alzheimer’s as a weapon of discredit, to influence the infighting of the Republicans.
The jury assessed this series of articles for the long research work that had to be carried out in order to be able to publish them and the impact of the journalistic work: uncovering the dirty game of the political parties, it has favored that protocols are changed and has obtained a wide response thanks to the political consequences it has generated.
Orriols already won two years ago, then alone, a Ramon Barnils award for research on age-related licenses in Parliament, a framework through which workers in the Catalan Chamber of Representatives could continue to be paid even though they had long since abandoned their job duties The publication of that series of reports caused changes in the functioning of Parliament.
In addition to the ARA award, the organization also distinguished the journalist Jordi Pascual, fromThe Cugatencin this case in the category of local media for a report detailing the wide-ranging approach applied by the Sant Cugat City Council with the Ametller Origen supermarket, which allowed it to be considered a “union of stalls” in order to be able – set up in the Municipal Old Market. Each of the prizes is endowed with 1,500 euros and the jury has also issued a special mention to the report Les manipulations de la Copa América, by La Directa, which highlighted the relationship between the major media and power structures.
This edition of the awards came with the novelty of incorporating an Honorary Award and the first recipient of the distinction was Professor Xavier Giró, lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who retired last year and recently published the book Against neutrality. The volume is a defense of journalism committed to the fair resolution of conflicts. In its justification, the jury values the influence and training on thousands of professionals and having “encouraged the tools that give meaning to journalism: critical spirit and analytical capacity”.
As in previous years, the award ceremony took place under the auspices of the Born Center for Culture and Memory in Barcelona and had the President of the Parliament, Josep Rull, as the highest institutional representative. Elisenda Pineda was the master of ceremonies in front of the two hundred attendees and the group Partiperes, finalists of this year’s Sona9 competition, set the musical note. The president of the Barnils Group, Enric Borràs – also deputy director of this newspaper – has taken advantage of his delivery speech to warn of the problems arising from doing journalism thinking more about the performance that can be offered by social networks or technological giants than the reader
In particular, he referred to the case of Google Discover, which often promotes articles with very little information protein. After reading some low-quality headlines, Borràs explained: “What we know for sure is that Google’s main mechanism for disseminating news prioritizes pieces like the ones in the headlines I read you. And therefore encourages the media to do them . And when public institutions subsidize or distribute institutional advertising on the internet, based only on the audience, they enhance this kind of content even more.” The recipe, for the journalist, is to remember that these services, in the end, compete for the reader’s attention like the journalistic media. “Google, Facebook, X, OpenAI… they are not our allies. They are not our enemy either. No matter how big they are, they are our competitors. Let’s not forget that,” he concluded.
