I got an invite last week from Jon Clarke the editor of The Olive Press to come along to his lair on the Costa del Sol and celebrate the twentieth anniversary of that august publication.
It’s a longish drive down there from my corner of Almería, especially in my elderly banger with no heating (that early morning start) and only the one cassette to stimulate me on the in-flight entertainment. It’s a bugger actually, as everyone says that oh, they just threw out a box of them only last month.
Coincidentally, the festivities fall on my birthday which is the very day that my Spanish driving licence goes phut.
I had a newspaper once, back in the eighties and nineties. It was based in Mojácar and eventually ran to three weekly editions in English plus a monthly in Spanish. Times were harder then – the local businesses weren’t so open to advertising as they appear to be now, and the national companies didn’t want to know – even when my wife would squeeze into a business suit and do the rounds in Madrid. Turned out that the large companies exclusively use agencies who get a cash chuck-back from the newspapers and magazines where they place the advert. One lives and learns. 
A second problem in those days was that no one had heard of desk-top publishing. We had to type out texts, print them up on bits of paper, cut them to size on a light-box, paste the whole thing together and fit a black and white photo here and there. Fiddly enough when it’s an article – but then along comes the client who wanted a special decoration on his advert, good for one insertion and was there a discount? That was the only income you would find from a free-sheet, so – as usual – the customer was always right.
Once the pages had been completed, we would haul the whole jim-cracker to the printers, 90 minutes away. Three times a week, usually me in the company Lada. Listening to a cassette. A few hours later, say six in the morning, the paper was ready, in bundles, to be whisked away to favoured locations.
At least, and unlike its successor, it had news, articles and entertainment within.
Then one day we got a tiny Macintosh computer, where you could create a page on the screen. Then a year or two later, colour arrived. No more blue-splash on the front and back, we suddenly had a full palette (unless the printers cocked it up). If that wasn’t enough, after a million trips taking the whole paper along to the city on a diskette, the Internet arrived (with that whizz, buzz whoosh noise as the phone was connected) and instead we could send the whole thing down the wire. It still took a long time, but the Modern Age was arriving for sure.
There were a few other problems too, employees can be crafty and a couple of them ended up with the paper, such is life.
I retired to do other stuff and here we are, twenty-five years later. Newspapers are pretty-much dead now, with the national titles losing sales every year and the kiosks closing down, with everybody moving to the Internet where there’s no limit to the page-size, or the links, or the ease-of-access or (above all) the incredible savings in production costs.
The Olive Press employs professional journalists (unlike its competitors) and produces a now monthly print-edition across Spain with a number of useful supplements. But its strength is in its Internet edition, its investigative reporting and its attention to the subject at hand: Spain.
Thus, they will be celebrating later this month, but I like to think that I was there first.