Catalan News Agency: a fantastic tool

Next October 1st, the Agència Catalana de Notícies (ACN) will present its English news service, the Catalan News Agency (CNA). ACN’s director Saül Gordillo says that the CNA aims to publish main news stories from Catalonia for an international audience. “The CNA wants to inform people from abroad about Catalonia, but from a Catalan point of view, so that foreign media do not only have the perspective of the Madrid based press”, argued Gordillo.

The director of the agency says that the CNA is an “ambitious” project. He explained that the English website is not an automatic translation of the agency’s main contents. On the contrary, journalists elaborate the information in English starting from scratch, bearing international media and the public in mind. “We offer more contextualised information that helps to understand the Catalan reality (...) There is no news provider in Catalonia with the intention of being understood abroad”.
The director of the agency said that the CNA is a “strategic plan for the future”' in order to “open” the company to the world. “The Agència Catalana de Notícies is the national news agency of Catalonia. As a public service, we thought that we should project Catalonia into the world. And to do it in English, especially in this moment of economic crisis and when the relationship between Catalonia and Spain is widely discussed”, he stated.
The English language service of the Catalan News Agency has 3 parts:
- The first one is a digital newspaper that includes the main news stories of the day.
- The second part of the website is an opinion blog called 'Catalan Views' in which recognised figures from the Catalan political, cultural, economic and social spheres participate.
- The third one is a newsletter with the most important information from the last fifteen days that will be sent to Catalan institutions abroad, foreign media, enterprises, tourist operators and universities. All the content of the CNA website is multimedia.