1618 is the year in which the appearance of the first Spanish newspaper can be established, of which eleven issues published in Valencia are known and is now being recovered in the critical edition Gaceta de Roma (Valencia, Felipe Mey, 1618-1620). Estudio y edición crítica del primer diario español  (2020, A Coruña, SIELAE)

The work was conducted by three academics, including Javier Díaz-Noci, a researcher with the DigiDoc research group at the UPF Department of Communication, together with the researchers Rafael Soto, of the University of Alcalá de Henares, and professor Carmen Espejo-Cala, from the University of Sevilla.

According to the authors, the background to the periodical dates from “just immediately after the outbreak of the Bohemian Revolt, which gave rise, in the summer of 1618, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). This event was decisive in the final leap to the emergence of periodical or semi-periodical informative publications in Europe. In this context, a gazette was published in Rome, of which no known copies have survived, and which shortly after a Valencian printer, Francisco Felipe Mey, had translated, printed and distributed in Spanish for three years, between 1618 and 1620, in Valencia”.

Today, eleven copies of the gazette are known about and are kept at the Royal Library of Turin (Italy), which professor Espejo-Cala, one of the best Spanish and European scholars of the journalism of the period, identified as a series and, ultimately, the first actual Spanish newspaper. She did so, precisely, in issue 2, of May 2011, in Obra Periodística. Hemeroteca Digital de Autores, a UPF digital publication.

The researchers published this research on 24 December 2020 and it can be found on the Internet. The special issue consists of an introduction and a critical edition of the first Spanish newspaper. It establishes the criteria for the publishing and modernization of journalistic texts of the Modern Age (16^th-18^th centuries), which the research project IbemNews on Spanish media and journalism in the 17^th century conducts continuously. For Catalan language, Díaz-Noci has also published a DigiDoc Report to establish the criteria for publishing gazettes.

Rafael Soto, Carmen Espejo-Cala and Javier Díaz-Noci are conducting a critical study and edition of the work they have called Gazeta de Roma (occasionally, the eleven issues of the series bear different titles) in which, in addition to explaining and establishing the criteria for publication, the authors study of the news activity of the period -the dawn of Spanish and European journalism-, on the Meys’ press in Valencia, and a study based on techniques of content analysis, social analysis of networks, narrative analysis and stylistic analysis, of the content, sources, authors and origins of the news contained in the newspaper.

In addition, the authors provide a double palaeographic and modernized edition of the eleven aforementioned issues, and a series of indices -of names, of authorities and of toponyms- to better understand the information networks of the time. The study aims to provide continuity with the issue of other early gazettes, in the various languages of Spain, belonging to the Modern Age.

Related work:

Soto-Escobar, R.; Díaz-Noci, J.; Espejo-Cala, C. (2020), Gaceta de Roma (Valencia, Felipe Mey, 1618-1620). Estudio y edición crítica del primer periódico español. A Coruña: SIELAE.