What you read here

This text that you are reading here is part of a type of communication that has been a great pillar for language and literature for decades.

Journalism, which is celebrating today in Spain because it is the day of its patron saint, Saint Francis de Sales, now seems to us to be one more part of our lives: what we call the media, which currently encompasses social networks and that previously included other innovative elements such as television or radio, was in its first manifestation a printed newspaper, something that only some of us determined continue to buy without fear of the shadow of ink on our fingers.

Schooling has sadly been a late chapter in our literate history, and even when it became general and compulsory, it was a very short period in the lives of individuals. For most Spaniards, the press was the source that spread news and spread it among those who knew how to read, who in turn sometimes read it collectively to others. And that daily reading practice were the only letters that, in many cases, some approached and others looked at without knowing how to decipher; understanding the headlines was the great achievement of those who with effort and as adults managed to learn to read. I know that many get angry, and rightly so, when journalism makes an inappropriate use of a word or when a misspelling splashes and detracts from one of these now digital flying sheets. modern cats,the linguistic responsibility of newspapers is as great as their circulation.

The newspaper has also been the writing school for many authors who today we consider literary figures but who were journalists in their beginnings.

In America, journalism tanned Roberto Arlt in the police chronicle, it sensitized Gabriel García Márquez in the portrait of characters when doing film criticism;

In Spain, Miguel Delibes is strengthened in reporting, in the photography of characters and events that became scenes and pictures in some of his resounding novels.

In the heat of those old journalist tools (the linotype, the tile, the chibalete) the laboratory of many of our writers, his school, rose invisibly.

Writing was nourishing work that also nourished them with themes and resources.

The written press has thus been a part of the informal education of many readers and a part of the writing training of many novelists. I am defending that what you are reading now on screen or on paper has been the primer for many Spanish-speakers and also the nursery for a good number of our authors. And this happens because the school, being enormous and fundamental, is not the only one that teaches reading; the black ink of journalism has involuntarily been chalk, the sheet paper has been blackboard, there is a lot of novelistic plot hidden in some press pieces. The printing presses were throwing textbooks in the form of newspapers and surely not even the professionals themselves were aware of it. Today is Journalists' Day, yes, but somehow it is also the day of language and literature.

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