About The Spain Report
(Photo: me asking some politicians questions during the pandemic)
Read The Spain Report to get clear, concise, original reporting, analysis and comment about how one country, Spain, is changing and coping with different areas of life that affect us all in this complex, global 21st Century.
Matthew Bennett has been in Spain for 25 years, the last 10 doing very in-depth reporting everywhere from inside Covid wards during the worst of the pandemic to the entire Catalan separatist trial at the Supreme Court.
Spain Notes: daily during the week (also follow on X here)
Quick Takes: daily during the week
Weekly Analysis (Subscribers): a bit of a longer read on Sundays
Premium Insider (Subscribers): once a month for subscribers
State of Spain (Subscriber Pro): quarterly letter + call with Matthew
Your paid subscription guarantees the independence of this analysis.
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📜 A brief history of The Spain Report
I first arrived in Spain about 25 years ago. My degree was in languages (French, Spanish) and linguistics, not journalism. Translation got me started explaining deeper differences between countries and systems.
Somebody invented blogging and Twitter. That was very useful for explaining, in both English and Spanish, what was going in the last economic crisis (2008) with the unemployment and political turmoil.
In 2013, it seemed like a good idea to turn all that blogging and bilingual explanation into an actual news site, to explain what was going on here to the world, so The Spain Report was born.
That first version was more focused on breaking or latest national Spain news, and I built a small corporate media company structure and a subscription website. It worked, almost.
2013-2018 was about politics and the economic crisis: the appearance of Podemos, the rise of Catalan separatism up to Puigdemont’s declaration of independence in 2017, several inconclusive general elections, the abdication of King Juan Carlos I and the proclamation of Felipe VI.
That first version of The Spain Report failed in 2018. Readers wanted information in Spanish too and suggested Patreon and a more personal approach, so a second version was born and a second website coded because Patreon is not a good publishing platform.
2018-2020 was all about trials and in-depth court reporting (every day of the Catalan separatist trial at the Supreme Court, then a notorious murder trial in Almería), and then the first year of the Covid pandemic. Fast bilingual twitter threads and analysis articles worked really well.
During the pandemic, governments insisted on trying to hide things and spin things and stop us from seeing what was really going on in hospitals and care homes, so I started reporting harder in that direction to do more video and ask the politicians direct questions in press conferences.
I did actually make it, after several months of developing trust at one hospital, all the way inside the Covid zones with a camera and a mic and questions and time to record so that you could see and hear what the doctors and nurses and patients wanted to tell you in their own words.
The politicians blocked access to the hospital because they didn’t like the “impertinent” questions I was asking at the press conferences at the same time, as another coronavirus wave crashed into the system before the vaccines (a bunch of the politicians here jumped the vaccine queue).
Now in 2022, for some reason or combination of reasons, readers don’t seem to want that kind of reporting any more (General information tsunami? News overload? Covid reality burnout? Inflation and discretionary spending?)…so I’ll do this national analysis newsletter about Spain for you on Substack.
(There were loads of stories along the way, of course, but you get the idea).
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📽️Me all the way inside the Covid wards…
Some of the “impertinent” questions to the politicians after reporting from inside the hospitals, that then got me kicked out of the hospitals:
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