El Punt Avui starts up new Catalan TV news channel

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El Punt Avui
07.02.2014 - 15:38

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Local television station Canal Català and daily newspaper El Punt Avui came to an agreement this week that will allow the media conglomerate (formed by El Punt Avui, sports paper El 9, Presència, L’Econòmic, Catalonia Today and Barçakids, in addition to its digital editions) to broadcast their own programming starting this very quarter as well as improve the websites of both El Punt Avui and El 9.

The agreement signed this Thursday by the President of the publisher of El Punt Avui, Joaquim Vidal i Perpinyà, and the owner of Canal Català, Nicola Pedrazzoli. Starting this March 1, the newspaper will be the leaseholder of the television licenses previously controlled by Canal Català and will accelerate the preparations so that, El Punt Avui Televisió can begin broadcasting its own programming at the end of the this quarter. Once the negotiations were completed between the two groups, now the agreement and programming plan must be approved by the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia [Consell de l’Audiovisual de Catalunya], an organ of the Catalan Government.

Canal Català current covers 50% of the territory of Catalonia and thus 80% of its population. The new leaseholders of the licenses, however, have established the goal in the short an medium term, to improve the reception of the new channel.

El Punt Avui considers this agreement to be a new step in its strategic plans for the future that will allow it to more confidently face the challenges in the communication sector as well as strengthen its position as the first important Catalan publishing group.

The addition of television content, which will also instigate changes in the group’s organization, will also lead to undeniable improvements in the group’s web pages, especially the digital editions of El Punt Avui and the sports paper El 9, since most of the contents that are broadcast by this new television channel will be available, sometimes live, so that readers and subscribers can follow the news via the internet.

The executive board of Hermes Comunicacions expressed its satisfaction on Thursday about the agreement and designated the CEO, Joan Vall, and the vice president, Lídia Vidal, as the directors of the new channel.

Since El Punt Avui TV will be exclusively focused on news its contents will be managed by the editors of the groups’ two newspapers: Xevi Xirgo (editor of El Punt Avui) for general news and Emili Gispert (editor of El 9) for sports news.

Programming
The new El Punt Avui TV channel will focus on news programming, based on content that is generated and shared among the different entities that make up the group and that can now be analyzed from a television perspective. Viewers will be able to find—through various information genres, including interviews, commentary, chats, debates, etc.—the key information for interpreting each day’s news with respect to the important moment that the country is going through. Indeed, this information plays such an important role in the print edition that it occupies two special sections: ‘Catalonia wants to live in freedom’ [Catalunya vol viure en llibertat] for information about the process towards independence and ‘Catalonia wants to live with dignity’ [Catalunya vol viure amb dignitat] with respect to social issues.

Although initially the bulk of the news will be concentrated in the evening-night timeslot, (with different spaces that will be announced in the coming weeks) the news content will be available during the whole day, not only through thematic spaces (cultural, sporting, economic…) but also through news headlines that will be able to be seen constantly—and that will be shared with the websites of El Punt Avui and El 9—and through news bulletins broadcast on the hour.

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