Headliners

The City of Barcelona puts out a monthly bulletin on glossy paper. I get it at home. We all get it at home--it's mailed to us. There are colour photographs on every page and the headlines are large. The headers--white characters red boxes--match those of the web page and advertising campaigns of the party that has governed the city, in coalitions, since 1979.

Informació Barcelona has a mission statement, available on line at http://w3.bcn.es/V38/Home/V38HomeLinkPl/0,3526,57975652_57993888_1,00.html. It's ostensibly meant to give citizens useful information about city services. That is, anyway, the written norm. The unwritten norms are "Publish headlines the mayor would love to see in the local press" and "Get the mayor into as many photographs, headlines and stories as possible without seeming a fanzine." In the March issue, the mayor's face appears seven times in twenty-four pages and his name at least twelve. Some examples: in an interview with the head of a music school who'd been given a medal for thirty years of hard work, the first question mentions the mayor. Rather than beginning with "Last February you were given a medal..." the piece begins "Last February the mayor, Jordi Hereu, gave you a medal." A design school affiliated with a local university has moved into a renovated building, part of the downtown campus. The mayor is in the piece and the picture, and gets the first quote. A new municipal gym is up and running: the mayor occupies the subject slot in the first sentence of the article, and the sight lines in the accompanying photograph converge on his smiling face. The mayor is not omnipresent, but his team is. Every piece on a city programme or service features a quote from an alderman or alderwoman holding a post at city hall.

This month's issue is actually remarkable for the mayor's low profile: in February, his name appeared twenty-three times in the first twelve pages, and the word "alcalde" (mayor) thirty-three times. And, yes, he made the cover.