Selected by my university to write for Mèdia.cat, Catalonia's critical media observatory, I reported a feature on how the press shapes the public story of overtourism — the year's defining conflict in Barcelona, Palma and Valencia.

Context

Mèdia.cat is the critical media observatory of the Grup Barnils, one of the most respected watchdogs of the Catalan press, published as part of its annual Mèdia.cat yearbook. I was selected by Blanquerna to contribute a feature analyzing not the tourism conflict itself, but how the media reports it.

What I did

I reported and wrote a feature on the media coverage of overtourism, interviewing working journalists across three territories, from Valencia, Mallorca, and Barcelona. Rather than cover the protests, I examined the coverage: how headlines get shaped by algorithms, how outlets choose between slogans and statistics, and whose voices get legitimized in the debate.

The angle

The piece argues that reporting doesn't just inform the tourism debate — it builds it: deciding what counts as a problem, which consequences get highlighted, and which voices are heard. It works through the mechanics — the pressure of clickable headlines, the way "record" tourism figures need context to mean anything, the tension between a public broadcaster's neutrality and the act of giving a platform to those without power. It's media criticism grounded in reporting: sourced from the journalists doing the work, not argued from theory.

Takeaways

This is where my two degrees meet most directly: the reporting discipline of journalism and the analytical eye of International Relations, applied to how narratives get built and who benefits from them. Understanding how a story is constructed — which frame wins, which data persuades, which voice gets left out — is the core skill of communications, seen from the side that studies it rather than the side that does it.