The cracks in reporting on tourism
How the media builds the story of overtourism, reported through the journalists who cover it, a feature for Catalonia's critical media observatory
About the project
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.