This Monday, the Board of Directors of RTVE approved coordination for RNE in the face of the crisis suffered by public radio. Ignacio Elguero adds this function to the one he performs as director of education, diversity, culture and international of the Corporation. The interim president, Concepción Cascajosa, has added Elguero’s proposal as coordinator to the agenda of the monthly Council meeting, which has been approved. According to a statement, he “will be in charge of coordinating a working group to prepare future strategy proposals for RNE,” the results of which will be presented in the fall. Elguero officially served as director of RNE between July 2020 and March 2021, before the arrival of José Manuel Pérez Tornero to the presidency.
Elected under an agreement between the PSOE, the PP, Unidas Podemos and the PNV, Tornero changed the senior management structure at RTVE under the premise of promoting horizontality. Since then, the figure of the director of general content covered both television and public radio and left the position of director of RNE relegated. Tornero’s subsequent abandonment of the presidency and the Board of Directors in September 2022 did not bring with it any modification in that structure during the interim presidency of Elena Sánchez, who ceased her position during a stormy plenary session of the Board of Directors last year. Easter week. This departure took place just after the same governing body of RTVE dismissed José Pablo López as director of general content at the proposal of Elena Sánchez. Since the dismissal of López, whose position has not been replaced, public radio remained headless and mired in internal unrest.
Concepción Cascajosa, successor to Elena Sánchez at the head of the Corporation as interim president, is now moving forward by recovering Ignacio Elguero as coordinator of RNE with the agreement of the Council. Elguero already had the direction of Radio Exterior de España and Radio Clásica under his control. The statement about his appointment says that “RNE’s non-news content will be in senior management, which will work in coordination with the RNE News Directorate, dependent on the Senior Directorate of News Content, and the RNE Media and Operations Directorate. dependent on the Senior Management of Production and Media.”
Spanish public radio has management problems that have lasted for more than a decade, according to internal sources. But the absence of official direction—unofficially, some executives and staff have been making decisions in terms of quasi-self-management—has led to a lack of control. Last week, a series of prominent RNE journalists made public a manifesto through social networks with the heading “To Whom It May Concern.” In the text, they noted that the workers said they felt “tired and disheartened” in the face of “the damage that time has done” that they have been “without direction.” The ink was drawn on the lack of “a long-term project” and the figure of “a management that defends its brand and its possibilities both in RTVE itself and in an increasingly competitive audiovisual panorama.” And they concluded: “We feel that the radio is moving forward thanks to our efforts, our vocation for public service and the work of some managers who row in the name of this essential ship for Spanish society, but which we feel abandoned adrift.”
Disillusionment prevails among public radio professionals. Several of them highlight the lack of definition of the grid for the next season that begins in September, when at this point it should already be planned. There is also concern about the lack of a long-term project. And due to the scarcity of profiles that are committed to holding positions of responsibility in the face of the instability of the Corporation, whose current interim president holds a temporary position with a Board of Directors pending renewal in half a dozen of her positions. In addition, among other senior management positions, the general secretary of the governing body and the general content directorate remain vacant since both dismissals in the explosive plenary sessions last Easter.
To address Elguero’s proposal as RNE coordinator before the Board of Directors, which does not entail a change in the organizational chart when assuming this new function, Concepción Cascajosa has waited to save the match ball in the Supreme Court. A recent ruling from the high court has endorsed the decision made by the Council of Ministers in 2022 to modify the social statutes of RTVE that allowed the appointment of the interim presidency of Elena Sánchez, and which by extension ratifies the appointment of Cascajosa as successor. With full executive power, the president of the Corporation has prioritized action on public radio. But nothing guarantees reversing the internal discouragement of its workers. An internal audit is underway to officially locate the problems.
Misgivings
Among the reluctance to the decisions made in recent times, several professionals agree on looking askance at the creation and development of the RTVE Audio platform. The main criticism comes from what they consider a dilution of the RNE brand in favor of the latter, in addition to the lack of knowledge about what the objective of that project is. There are also those who feel a lack of internal projection of the in-house workers as happens in other competing radio stations, where stars are also forged from within. And others add that the greatest focus of management has historically been placed on the television leg of RTVE. Meanwhile, public radio audiences maintain a figure below one million listeners, according to the latest wave of the General Media Study (EGM).
The professional efforts they have put in during these months without official direction, the consulted workers insist, has made it possible to continue broadcasting programming over the airwaves. An RTVE union representative adds that RNE’s old problems were aggravated by the change in structure that Tornero carried out to promote a horizontality that looked good on paper, but was left half-finished and left a general content direction — today vacant—on which everything depended.
Patches. Grill in the making. Lack of professional motivation. And a fierce competition on the airwaves where politics and advertising determine the structures and development of broadcasts for the rest of the media. These are some of the challenges that Ignacio Elguero will have to face in his new RNE coordination.
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