The Making of a Mass Media in Spain

Abstract

Explores Spain’s slow move to a mass media relative to more industrialized nations like England and France by examining the technological and ideological obstacles to the mass production of periodicals. Focuses on Blanco y Negro, Spain’s first moderately priced illustrated weekly magazine that enjoyed a meteoric success by combining images and text to sell ideas as well as products. Believes the journal achieved its stature by owning its own factory with rolling presses, producing lavishly illustrated advertisements, mounting aggressive publicity campaigns, appealing to multiple classes of people, making generous use of photography and color, promoting field reporting, and refusing to give allegiance to a particular political party or institution. Concludes that by overcoming a host of technological and economic obstacles and appealing to centrist and nationalist concerns, by the turn of the century Blanco y Negro had become a commodity that came more and more to seem like a necessity for large numbers of people.