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Javier Moreno to be appointed editor-in-chief EL PAÍS

16-06-2020

Javier Moreno, nuevo  director de EL PAÍS
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Soledad Gallego-Díaz will continue her association with the newspaper after her term ends

The Board of Directors of EL PAÍS has approved the appointment of a new editor-in-chief of the newspaper, thereby setting in motion the process established by the company for successions at the top of the leading daily. The CEO of PRISA and Chairperson of the Board of Directors of EL PAÍS, Manuel Mirat, proposed that Javier Moreno replace Soledad Gallego-Díaz, who, after completing two years of her initial commitment, asked the company that she be replaced. The EL PAÍS Journalists' Committee and newsroom staff were informed of the upcoming changeover on Monday, in compliance with the statutes governing EL PAÍS’s newsroom, and Moreno’s appointment will be submitted to a non-binding vote among the newspaper's staff on Wednesday. Once the results of the consultation have been received, the EL PAÍS Board of Directors will move to ratify the appointment. The appointment of the new editor-in-chief has also been greenlighted by the Delegate Committee of PRISA’s Board of Directors, as well as by its Appointments, Remuneration and Corporate Governance Committee.

Soledad Gallego-Díaz, who will continue her association with EL PAÍS by collaborating regularly on content, has successfully met all those goals she set herself when she took on the top job at the newspaper. Her stewardship gave new life to the founding principles of EL PAÍS and led to a revitalization of best practice in journalism as envisaged in the newspaper's Style Book. In addition, she launched the newspaper’s new subscription model, which has been up and running since May 1. 

Javier Moreno, who held the top post at EL PAÍS between 2006 and 2014 and who has been the editor-in-chief of EL PAÍS América since June 2018, now faces the challenge of completing the process of digital transformation of the world’s leading Spanish-language newspaper and of further developing the new subscription model.

Javier Moreno was born in Paris in 1963. He has a degree in Chemistry – with a specialty in industry -– from the University of Valencia (1988) and worked in the sector in Germany (BASF, Ludwigshafen) until 1992, when he completed the UAM-EL PAÍS Master in Journalism. Initially he worked in the Economy section of the newspaper and in 1994 he joined the Mexico edition – what is now EL PAÍS América – as chief editor in Mexico City. After returning to Spain in 1997, he joined the International section. In 1999, he was appointed head of the Economy section and in 2002 he took over as the newspaper's correspondent in Berlin. In 2003, he was appointed chief editor of the business and finance newspaper Cinco Días.

In 2005 he returned to EL PAÍS, initially as assistant managing editor of the EL PAÍS Sunday edition, and later as editorial supervisor. In 2006, coinciding with the newspaper's 30th anniversary, he was named chief editor, a position he held until May 2014. During his tenure, the newspaper underwent the first major overhaul of its print edition. It also merged the print and digital newsrooms to launch the current digital edition.

The El PAÍS newsroom was actively involved in some of the biggest international exclusives of the time including the US State Department’s cables leak, along with The New York Times and The Guardian, and the scoop known as Chinaleaks, as well as major national news stories such as the Bárcenas papers, among many others. In 2013, he launched the Americas edition of the newspaper.

After leaving his post at the helm of EL PAÍS in 2014, Moreno was active as the founder-director of the Leading European Newspaper Alliance (LENA), which groups together eight leading newspapers in Europe (Le Figaro, Le Soir, Tages-Anzeiger, Tribune de Genève, Die Welt, La Repubblica, Gazeta Wyborcza and EL PAÍS). He was also head of the UAM-EL PAÍS School of Journalism from December 2017 to June 2018, after which he was appointed chief editor of EL PAÍS in the Americas, based in Mexico City.

Soledad Gallego-Díaz (Madrid, 1951) has pursued a long and varied career at EL PAÍS for more than four decades. She studied at the Official School of Journalism and her first job was at the agency Pyresa, after which where she began working at Cuadernos para el Diálogo, where she remained until its closure in 1978. She joined EL PAÍS immediately after its founding in 1976  as a collaborator specialized in political news, combining her work, for a time, at Cuadernos para el Diálogo, until she permanently joined the political section of the newspaper. She served as a parliamentary correspondent during key moments of the Transition to democracy. Indeed, it was she, together with Federico Abascal and José Luis Martínez, who obtained and exclusively published the draft of the Spanish Constitution of 1978.

Subsequently, at the end of 1979, she took over the EL PAÍS bureau in Brussels. Her experience in international news was reinforced during with two further top-level appointments to London and Paris.

Back at the EL PAÍS HQ, she was first appointed section editor and then assistant managing editor of the newspaper, a position she held for five years. She later worked as correspondent in New York and Buenos Aires, before returning to the position of deputy editor and being appointed to the ombudsman role of Reader's Editor.

Soledad Gallego-Díaz is widely recognized as one of Spain’s most renowned journalists. She has been honored with many awards throughout her career, including the Salvador de Madariaga Prize, the Margarita Rivière Prize, the Francisco Cerecedo Prize and the Cirilo Rodríguez Prize. In 2018, she won the Ortega y Gasset Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

 

 

 

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