2015年经济学人 西班牙报业的压力 一个持续紧缩的制度（在线收听）

Spain's press

A shrinking order

Sacked editors are a sign more of financial than political pressures

JOURNALISTS are supposed to check their facts, but when editors are sacked rumours will do.

Some see dark political forces behind the ousting of editors at Spain's three big dailies,El Pais, El Mundo and La Vanguardia.

But the upheaval also reflects a deeper business crisis.

Until last month, Pedro Ramirez had edited El Mundo from its birth 25 years ago.

Famed for investigations, sharp-tongued columnists and conspiracy theories, it ruffled many feathers.

Mr Ramirez blames Mariano Rajoy's ruling Popular Party (PP) for his sacking.

The new editor, Casimiro Garcia-Abadillo, points to poor sales, which have halved in five years,

and says Mr Ramirez alienated readers loyal to Mr Rajoy who found a feud over PP corruption too personal.

El Pais's editor, Javier Moreno, also pursued corruption.

But he has overseen a fall in circulation and last year sacked almost a third of the staff, damaging morale even as he cut operating losses.

El Pais aims to be “the global newspaper” in Spanish; its next editor, Antonio Cano, ran its Latin American website.

Mr Cano denies that El Pais will shed its centre-left identity, though he is clearly more conservative than Mr Moreno.

El Mundo vies with El Pais for domination of the Hispanic world's online news audience,

but turning that into money is an uphill task, admits a senior executive at El Mundo.

La Vanguardia's local Catalan subscription base has kept it mostly profitable.

There the choice of Marius Carol as the next editor is being interpreted as a shift from the Catalan nationalist flag-waving of his predecessor, Jose Antich.

If newspapers are not bending to political pressures, might they bow to more commercial ones?

Some journalists admit to self-censorship for fear of annoying big advertisers.

El Mundo accused Telefanica of cutting advertising after it reported a 2002 insider-trading probe against the firm's chairman, Cesar Alierta, a charge Telefanica denied.

Although Telefanica accounts for only a small fraction of advertising—the biggest general advertisers are non-Spanish multinationals like Procter & Gamble and L'Oreal—

other channels of influence also exist. Loss-making Prisa, the owner of El Pais,

has been repairing its balance-sheet and has won a reprieve from its bankers.

But after conversion of a convertible bond, Prisa's banks will own 16% of the shares, more than the founding Polanco family.

Telefanica will also have a stake, and hedge funds claim another 17%.

The biggest challenge is more fundamental. Dailies reach just a third of Spaniards.

Print-advertising income has fallen by 56% since 2008; digital advertising has not made up for this.

Owners want higher paper sales, more advertising and fancy websites,

all done with smaller budgets and fewer staff. Battling political pressure is the least of their worries.