Xavier Aldekoa: "Journalism, in essence, has not changed"

When Xavier Aldekoa (Barcelona, ​​41 years old) was a child, there was a "story", one of those that his father told and acted out with his brothers, which stood out among his favorites.

It was a Jules Verne story,

, in which little Dick, tricked, ends up stranded on the African coast.

Since then he began to dream of Africa, long before landing on the continent, almost 20 years ago.

“For someone curious, there is no better place than Africa”, this winner of the Ortega y Gasset Award for the best multimedia coverage for

, a series of reports published in

between November and December 2022.

Aldekoa defines himself as a reporter and defends that, in essence, journalism has not changed, although the way of doing it has.

For the award-winning project, which includes photographs and videos, he used small notebooks that he filled in during the more than two months that the river crossing lasted, and a mobile phone "that gave me sufficient quality and avoided problems with rebels or police and permits and did not imply added weight”.

Even so, every time he talks about the award-winning series, he also talks about teamwork in which the director of the newspaper, Jordi Juan, stands out so much, that he gave him time and only asked that they not have to go looking for him, and his computer graphics, video and design colleagues “who went out of their way” so that the project could go ahead just as Aldekoa himself had dreamed and designed it.

"It has been exciting and beautiful," he says.

The 4,700-kilometre journey through the Congo reveals the essence of each of the Africas on the continent, “luminous, dark and scarred”, Aldekoa qualifies.

“It is a river of extremes, generous beyond measure but also hostile and violent beyond measure,” she adds.

All this is reflected in the eight chapters of the award-winning report for which he had to negotiate with rebels, travel with 300 people in a barge prepared for 50, listen to the stories of the tribes, investigate their ways of life and the uncertainty of not know if I was going to be able to complete the project.

“It was a very intense trip in which, despite how prepared and designed it was, it forced me to constantly improvise,” she recounts.

"I was not looking for an adventure, I wanted to tell a complex region," she sums up.

Xavier Aldekoa had one goal: to tell the Congo well, that the stories be balanced, that they reflect the beauty of nature and the generosity of its people as well as the danger and risk of each of the areas.

"There were moments when I thought I couldn't, that I had no choice but to lower my arms," ​​he recalls, but the reporter recovered from them until he built the story that earned him the Ortega y Gasset Award, which the jury He highlighted his story “well put together in which all its multimedia elements are perfectly integrated.

Each piece is in itself a valuable journalistic content and, as a whole, they form a transversal travel story in which topics as diverse as the environment or inequality are addressed”.