Two of Spain’s biggest newspapers sack their editors

The Spanish media is in a state of shock after the country’s two biggest newspapers each announced they were replacing their editors within three weeks of each other.

El País , Spain's largest news daily, confirmed on its website on Tuesday night that editor-in-chief Javier Moreno will leave his post to be succeeded by the newspaper's Washington correspondent, Antonio Caño.

At the end of January, rival El Mundo had made a similar announcement. Pedro J Ramírez, who had led the right-leaning paper for 25 years, said he was departing due to "pressure from the powers that be".

Leading voice
Founded in 1976, just months after dictator Francisco Franco died, El País has traditionally been seen as the leading voice of centre-left politics in the Spanish media. However, in recent years it has struggled with the challenges of falling print sales due to the arrival of internet media and plummeting advertising revenue caused by the country's deep economic crisis.

Its circulation has fallen from 435,000 in 2006, when Mr Moreno became editor, to just over 300,000 last year.

"It's been a privilege to edit El País for the last eight years. Thanks to all those who helped me do it," said the outgoing editor on Twitter.

But his tenure has been perhaps the most fractious period in the paper’s history. In late 2012, it laid off more than 120 workers – a third of its staff. A bitter stand-off ensued, with many journalists staging protests, and at one point even refusing to put their names to articles. Spain’s supreme court recently ruled that several of the newspaper’s firings had been carried out unlawfully and that it owed some former employees extra severance pay.

A close ally of Juan Luis Cebrián, chief executive of the paper’s parent company Prisa, Mr Moreno was not a popular figure in the newsroom. But his replacement, Mr Caño, is something of a mystery, given he has been posted abroad.

“It’s all happened very quickly, so there’s a lot of perplexity surrounding all this,” said one senior journalist at the paper. “Given recent events – the layoffs and the economic crisis – people are wondering what will happen next.”

Extra intrigue
The appointment has been lent extra intrigue after it emerged that last week Mr Caño had mistakenly sent to dozens of fellow journalists an email meant only for his boss, Mr Cebrián. Another newspaper, El Plural , says the email was effectively an application for the editorship, calling for a major shakeup of senior management at El País and a lurch to the right in its politics to win new readers.

The changes at El País seem to be more consensual than those at El Mundo last month, where Mr Ramírez, one of the Spanish media's most eccentric and controversial figures, was clearly forced out.

In an opinion article in the New York Times , he accused prime minister Mariano Rajoy of lobbying for his sacking because his paper had tenaciously pursued a corruption scandal affecting the governing party.