In a third book, Micó explores new paths for journalism

2023-06-12 06:31:00

“Journalism is now more necessary than ever, because the world is becoming more and more complex, but at the same time journalism also has more and more competitors and it costs more to reach. That is why alternative formulas, new paths must be found». Josep Lluís Micó (La Font de la Figuera, 1974) has spent years trying to find these new paths, or providing tools to help open them. With a long experience in the newsrooms of Levante-EMV i Girona newspaper (he continues to collaborate there) and then at university (he is professor of Journalism at the Ramon Llull University and dean of Blanquerna Communication and International Relations), Micó knows the job very well and has not stopped practicing it, although now it does it in a different way: The depth of the pockets (Saldonar, 2023) is the third book he has published with real stories of journalistic interest but told with narrative structures far removed from those that are common in the media.

In addition, the stories presented by Josep Lluís Micó in this work and in the previous ones (Organic chemistry2019, i Holders and reservationsof 2021), they are not of those who would open newscasts or center hours and hours of debates and social gatherings. Despite this, he defends that “surprising facts can still be found, or data can be revealed that may be of interest to the public, and be useful, and that even if they do not meet the exceptionality required by a major headline, or a massive presence in the public debate, they do serve to do journalism in a different way, and perhaps in the long run influence the journalism that is done on a day-to-day basis.’

The two stories of The depth of the pockets answer to that pattern: “Et deixo” narrates in the form of an inner monologue the confessions that an American professor made to Josep Lluís Micó about a clandestine sexual relationship and possible participation in a crime, while in “Contemporary History” he uses the a large amount of information that he gathered over many years about the so-called Ruta del Bakalao Valenciana to explain the reunion between two precisely Valencian women, one a millionaire and the other with few resources, who join forces to relive those festive days that they had neither limits nor complexes.

In the foreword to the book, filmmaker Judith Colell admits that “before reading Josep Lluís Micó’s books, I was unaware of literary journalism. It wasn’t a genre I usually read, and I was a little lazy to begin with. With him, I discovered a genre that is much more literary than journalistic, which tells us about reality from an unusual, original point of view.’ Colell, who is working on the film adaptation of one of the stories from Micó’s previous bookinsists in the prologue of The depth of the pockets that “reality, something so difficult to portray and for which the filmmakers look for the most elaborate ways to do it, becomes in these stories a fact that seems to be the easiest”.

“Journalism is now more necessary than ever, because the world is increasingly more complex”

In fact, in a recent interview on the show More 324 of Televisió de Catalunya, Micó commented that “journalists have the opportunity and I would say the obligation to try to go even further and, using exclusively real facts, things that happen even if they do not occupy the big headlines, nor the debates, neither talk shows nor analyses, because it is probably not their place, to explain them because they help to understand the world. These are the experiences of common, ordinary people, but they give us clues about what the present is like and where the future is going, even if they don’t open the news or take up hours and hours.”

In this sense, Micó explained a Girona newspaper about one of the two stories in the book, “Contemporary History”, which “had a lot of raw material for the story, a lot of information that I had worked on as a journalist in Valencia, but that was often left out of the daily news pieces . It was context information that we often take away from the public but which instead ends up being fundamental, so that apparently secondary elements, sensory aspects, things you see and hear, two main senses for the stories of everyday journalism, can also serve you to bring people to another situation”. Although, he points out, “everything I do in these books must have a certain basis».

The difference is that during the time that Micó worked as a journalist in the newsrooms of Levante o Girona newspaper, with this certain foundation he would have built more or less conventional journalistic artifacts in the form of a Time.news, or a report, or a strict news story, and now he goes further and experiments with the style of the journalistic story. And that’s why the confession in “I leave you” is presented in the form of an inner monologue, and in “Contemporary History” that context takes on such prominence. As already happened, also, for example, in his previous book, Holders and reservations, where the narrative “Tips to cut an onion without crying” (the one that Judith Colell is adapting to film) was a kind of western about a city family that moves to a town during the pandemic and suffers harassment; he completely dispensed with the figure of the narrator in “Producte interior brut”, a story about a university student who becomes a luxury escort to pay for a master’s degree; and transformed into rap lyrics dozens of interviews with people related to drug trafficking in the third of the stories, “People who pass by”.