Tell us your love story

The most widely circulated newspaper in Brazil,

O Globo

, has just made an emblematic request to its readers: to tell them a love story to publish it.

The colossus of written and television communication does not fail to know that all attempts to offer readers “positive news” instead of misfortunes have already failed in the past.

And it is known to all that the past experiences in the world of newspapers with only good news, even distributed free on the streets, ended up failing.

It was said then with irony that what readers like “is blood.”

It is possible that

O Globo

, which still reaches me in paper form and for free almost at dawn in a small town in the interior of Rio, has sensed that while newspapers are losing readers.

In addition, social networks, loaded with so-called negative news, accumulate millions of followers.

Newspapers, and not only paper ones but also digital ones, are losing ground to new technologies and even more so now from artificial intelligence.

And despite all the guarantees they offer of credulity and quality, they are seeing that the networks are occupying their territory.

It is a reality that I do not dare to adjective.

O Globo

has given great importance, even graphic in its edition last Wednesday, to the call to its readers: “Tell your love story.”

He asks his readers to tell them, without worrying about whether it is a literary work, a text between 2,000 and 5,000 characters, about any love story.

It can be “romantic love, long or fleeting, from a long marriage or one that has already ended.

“Story of a brother or friend… And even of their favorite animal.”

The diary asks readers to write their love story in as much detail as possible.

The Brazilian newspaper offers readers all the facilities: “You don't need to be a writer.

We are here to help you.”

The important thing, he says, “is that the story has content with genuine emotion.”

The story will be published in the print and digital edition.

It is possible that many people may find O Globo

's request

even childish.

At this point, is it necessary to talk about love when the world is wallowing in questions that even address the danger of its existence? With the specter in sight of a possible world war, climate crises and epidemics?

Talk about love when the pillar that supported modernity and the values ​​of democracy is crumbling to give way to the new political ogres of global disaster?

Although it may seem like a paradox, the initiative contains a drama that is real: the generational restlessness that is creating the avalanche of news in the world of global communication, something totally unprecedented in the history of humanity.

Today everyone, even the illiterate, can be writers, journalists, communicators, imitators, artists with just a handful of instruments in their hands.

And in vain the world authorities scramble at world congresses to see how to avoid this new demon that has emerged in the veins of communication such as

fake news

.

Who dares to open their cell phone to bet that what they are reading is true or false or to what extent it is true or invented?

Yes, even the best and most tender love stories, even the news that could be a consolation in the desert of so many dramas and so many crimes, lack, in that cauldron of the networks, credibility.

It is difficult for someone who has been working in this profession of journalism for half a century to understand the candid initiative of

O Globo

, to ask its readers to write their small or large “love stories.”

We all know, without the need for Freud, of the portion of masochism that human beings carry within them.

We know that the news of a catastrophe or a major political scandal will always have much greater attraction for readers than a poem.

Why then, and precisely at this historical moment, does a newspaper urgently ask and beg its readers to tell them their small or big love stories?

True, it is not worth disqualifying the initiative.

And given the team of great journalists, young and veteran, and political analysts on their staff, it is only possible to imagine that they have come to the conclusion that, if not all, a good part of the readers are tired of reading every morning, so much horror, so many family crimes, so many natural disasters along with the increase in serious psychological disorders.

Perhaps one reason for a large newspaper to reach the limit of asking readers to write their little love stories, not as a literary exercise but as a life experience and almost as therapy, is the increase in today's publications, of any kind. type, insist on the tragedy of the increase in diseases related to our brain and caused by a kind of universal stress that causes pain and inexorably leads to the consumption of increasingly heavier drugs.

Without seeming irony, perhaps

O Globo

has understood that even a small love story, a psychic caress, can supplement and expand in this historical period the hearts of the world better than the new drugs under whose invention cruel capitalism always tends to hide.

Follow all the information from El PAÍS América on

Facebook

and

X

, or in our

weekly newsletter

.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_