At the beginning of September 2022 it was announced that Alejandra Herranz (Barcelona, 50 years old) would present the desktop edition of the Newscast of the 1, after more than 30 years of Ana Blanco in that work. “She is part of people’s lives. She is a huge responsibility because you have to be at least up to it, ”says the journalist, who already took over the evening news on RTVE during the summer. In these months, Herranz, who has been deputy director of the program TVE’s Breakfastseditor and presenter on the 24-Hour Channel, has marked her own personality and has put a face on milestones for the chain, such as the coverage of the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, for which she traveled to the Polish border with the attacked country for Russia.
Ask. Is the afternoon edition the most complex of the RTVE news programs?
Answer. The one at lunchtime is more demanding than the one at night, which has a more leisurely pace and analysis. We often change the opening a quarter of an hour before (or even two minutes before) the live broadcast begins. It is very fun and dynamic and also an adrenaline rush that lasts for many hours afterwards.
Q. And, besides, she was already his deputy editor before becoming his presenter.
R. I always advocate that the presenters are always on the editing team. In RTVE they all are de facto. His opinion counts as one more. It is a very solid team, which is well armed, so my double duty is better that way.
Q. What did you feel when you had to add to your usual work that of replacing none other than Ana Blanco?
R. It is a privilege to take your baton, because it is an institution in this house, but also throughout the country. At first, he was a bit dizzy. Since he catches me a little older, I take it from a distance and you relativize everything. If not, the weight of a change like this can take you ahead. But the day it was announced, we had to cover the death of the Queen of England and the live three hour special kept me unaware until later. I try to get away from the noise. Each presenter marks his style. I talk about it a lot with Lorenzo Milá. We really like that each one is as it is. In one way or another, his naturalness is transmitted on the screen.
Q. You bet on the digital potential of the public entity, from YouTube to RTVE Play.
R. I don’t have much control over the digital world and I manage only relatively. But I really believe it’s the future. I watch it with my children. They are 13 years old and handle all kinds of supports. Our future lies in combining all of them, creating exclusive material for each one, either for YouTube, but also feeding on what we do on linear television, so that it can be seen on other platforms, such as the networks or RTVE Play. The possibilities on TikTok are amazing even to sell our own Newscast to another audience.
Q. How did the coverage of the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine?
R. The subject was worth the effort. In addition, these specials are a field in which we grow at RTVE. It was an opportunity to show muscle. It meant a huge effort from those who showed their faces and did the reports, but also from the people who stay in the newsroom, from documentation, graphics, realization, production… Opportunities like this are important for a news program like the TD1, in which current events run over you all the time. Being able to stop for a day to do 30 or 35 minutes of calmer, calmer information, with more analysis, more elaborate graphics… is something we can’t do every day.
Q. How do you see the change in trends in informative storytelling? There are those who reject the abuse of augmented reality and advocate staying in the essence of expert analysis.
R. The important thing is to use the tool well. We have things we didn’t have before. Now you can tell many things in a different way, without falling into the show. It is not about walking around the set just because and adding many artifices and then not saying anything. The visual helps to better tell some information that is rougher and that we did not support well in image before.
Q. Journalism is plagued by precariousness that weighs down information. Often, not even the big media have a solid network of international correspondents.
R. This type of international coverage cannot be left out. Everything that happens, from Ukraine to Silicon Valley or the enormous influence of China, seems to be far away, but it is affecting us in our day to day, especially in prices. Everything from there is going to get here one way or another. Fortunately, at RTVE we are privileged in that sense. It is not to throw flowers at us, but there is no better international information than what is done on RTVE. It is our hallmark.
Q. But the public entity is often involved in controversy, due to the duration or cost of its entertainment programs or the way its news programs are managed. How do you evaluate this scrutiny?
R. RTVE is a public medium and has to be subject to public scrutiny. It has to be as transparent as possible in labor and economic matters. It is a fundamental matter. In the information services we try to be affected as little as possible by all that surrounding noise, but when one day you are the center of debate or controversy, it does not help our work.
Q. How do you assess the permanent loss of classic house names? Jesús Álvarez has left in a sour way after 40 years working at RTVE.
R. Generational changes have to exist little by little. I say it, that I am already having an age. The change of faces is inevitable. In any case, in this profession, as in many others, seniority is a degree, it has an inestimable value. All the accumulated experience allows you to see things that others do not see or approaches that others miss. I think that seniority can be combined with the strength and impetus of those who are starting.
Q. Maruja Torres recently commented in The Évole thing that he did not agree with Kapuściński that a good journalist is usually a good person.
R. I don’t know if to be a journalist you have to be a good person. What I know is that this profession has a lot of empathy, of putting yourself in the place of the other, at least, that is the journalism that interests me. And for that you have to try to be a good person. And it may sound naive, but I think that in this life you always have to try to be a good person, regardless of the job you do. I always repeat that to my children.
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