Elpais.com Biography & Web Analysis

Spanish daily newspaper El Pas is published in Spanish. The Spanish media juggernaut PRISA owns El Pas, which has its headquarters in Madrid.

As of December 2017, it is Spain's second-most widely read daily newspaper. One of the Madrid dailies, El Pas, is the most widely read newspaper in Spanish online and is regarded as Spain's de facto official national newspaper (along with El Mundo and ABC). Its average daily sales in 2018 were 138,000.

Although it has regional offices in the major Spanish towns of Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Bilbao, and Santiago de Compostela where regional editions were created until 2015, its headquarters and core editorial team are based in Madrid. A world version of El Pas is additionally published in Madrid and is accessible online in both English and Spanish (Latin America).

A group from PRISA, including Jesus de Polanco, José Ortega Spottorno, and Carlos Mendo, created El Pas in May 1976. Reinhard Gade and Julio Alonso were in charge of designing the paper. It was first released on May 4, 1976, six months after tyrant Francisco Franco passed away and marked the start of Spain's democratic transition. Juan Luis Cebrián served as the daily's first editor in chief.

In a time when all other Spanish newspapers were influenced by Franco's philosophy, El Pas was the first pro-democracy publication. In its debut year, the publication had a circulation of 116,600 copies. In 1977, it increased to 138,000 copies.

Political unrest caused a far-right terrorist attack on El Pas in 1978. One person passed away and two others suffered serious injuries. Building structural integrity was also compromised.

At a period when the transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy was still taking shape, El Pas filled a void in the market and emerged as the daily of Spanish democracy. For this accomplishment, El Pas received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and the Humanities in 1983. Juan Luis Cebrián, who arrived from the daily newspaper Informaciones, served as the paper's initial director (up until 1988). He had worked for the Francoist sindicato vertical's mouthpiece Diario Pueblo, which translates to "People's Daily," like many other Spanish journalists of the era.

During the attempted coup d'état by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero of the Guardia Civil on February 23, 1981, it gained a reputation as a bulwark of Spanish democracy. El Pas published a special edition of the newspaper titled "El Pas, for the Constitution" during the tumultuous circumstances of the evening of February 23, 1981, when all members of parliament were being held hostage in the Congress building and with tanks on the streets of Valencia. This was before the state television station could transmit a speech by King Juan Carlos I denouncing the coup. It was the first daily newspaper with a pro-democracy stance that was readily available at the time.