What was your first job as a journalist?
I did an internship at El País newspaper in the Barcelona newsroom. I walked through all the neighborhoods of the city. I met teachers, policemen, thieves, electricians, shopkeepers, drug dealers, local politicians, prostitutes and priests, and they let me ask them questions. There is nothing like it.
Have you ever used a typewriter?
Wow, no, but I'd love to!
How is social media changing news?
It makes everything infinite, urgent, short and without context. That's why it's a great time for journalism.
Who's your favorite fictional journalist?
Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Lester Bangs in Almost famous is wonderful fiction.
What does it mean to be a journalist?
Being a journalist is to draw an urgent map -always provisional- of where we are.
What's the funniest news-related #hashtag you've seen?
Old stuff. Like .
How do you prefer to be pitched on stories?
By email.
What's your favorite social network?
Now is MuckRack.
Who do you wish followed you?
The old journalists who helped me.
Why did you become a journalist?
I love being away from home, meeting people, listening and writing. I can't be anything else.
Did you work for your high school newspaper? If so, what did you do there?
In my high school there was no newspaper. We should have started one, but my friends and I were too drinking and listening to records.
What story are you most proud of writing or working on?
Usually the last one that has been published. But I remember very much a chronicle -very short, written without time- in which I talked about the times of the Spanish Civil War with an old couple. They told me that when they fled to France when Franco's troops won, they met the Republican poet Antonio Machado, one of the greatest poets in a country of poets like Spain.
What advice can you offer to aspiring journalists?
Search, search and search for more.
When's the best time to pitch you?
Always.
What's the best pitch you ever got?
The best pitch I've ever received is one I'm working on right now: the leader of the gang that assaulted a bank in Barcelona -the Banco Central-, has confessed to me the motives and details of that mysterious action, which took place on May 23, 1981. This is a subject that at the time was covered by The New York Times (and by the CIA, as I have been able to read in some classified documents).
It was a nightmarish weekend in the early years of Spain's fragile democracy. The assailants took more than 200 people - bank workers and customers - hostage for 37 hours. They were demanding the release of several imprisoned military officers, accused of an attempted coup d'état, which had occurred three months earlier.
Forty years later it is still unclear whether the assault was a political action to try to destabilize the country, or whether it was a group of common thieves with an extraordinary imagination. That's why I'm writing a non-fiction book about it for Libros del KO.
What's the worst pitch you ever got?
It's not the worst pitch, but I'm not going to do anything with it: I just read a press release explaining that the Moraleja Rural Training Center (Extremadura) will auction purebred Retinta cows on January 26. In fact, I would really love to go to Moraleja (Extremadura) and cover the story of one of the families that gets a cow.
What's your favorite drink?
Black coffee in the morning and dark Ribera del Duero wine in the evening.
When you're not at a computer, where are you most likely to be?
On the street.
Aside from your own, what's your favorite publication to read?
New: Nokton magazine. Old: Esquire classics.
What's the most common misperception about your beat?
I don't know.
