The Editorial Staff of EL PAÍS, from within

Let's start with you, the readers. Since 1985, they have had someone to defend them from us journalists. The matter is very curious. And the position is complex. "Sometimes I cross the newsroom and I feel people looking at me out of the corner of their eye in case I'm talking to someone. Or, if I stop to ask anything, how that person gets tense, thinking that I'm coming with a complaint," she says on the phone, somewhere between amused and resigned. The Reader's Advocate is Soledad Alcaide. In his office, so that he does not "go crazy", he has a clipping of the first article of the first in office, Ismael López Muñoz: "I receive calls because when I finish reading EL PAÍS my hands are stained with ink and I have to wash them to eat my mid-morning sandwich. The technical managers of the newspaper have been warned of complaints." Alcaide says today: "People, when they think of the defender, believe that she is the guardian of the code of ethics and that the reader calls you indignant because the Style Book has been violated. And in reality they call you, above all, to protest because the crossword puzzle is not working for them or because the newspaper stains their hands." Errata or grammatical errors, issues of style, fill his time more than matters of journalistic substance, which are the ones that usually, because they are interesting, occupy his columns. If he walks around the Editorial Office it is precisely because his place is there: “I notice that, when I talk to the editors on the phone, people immediately become defensive.” When he ran the newspaper