Goodbye to El Universal?

That is the question many of us who write for this paper have been asking ourselves since we learned of its sale. In the end I think what its managing editor, Elides Rojas, said on Twitter will prevail: “El Universal’s experience will be its own, and whatever happens, ethics and integrity will certainly prevail when decisions are made.” So we will see as we go.

In the end, ethics and integrity will have the last word. Because if anything has characterized El Universal in its 105 years of life, and earned it great respect around the world, it has been the transparency, ethics and journalistic professionalism of everyone who works and contributes here.

Let us hope that continues in this new stage, which caught us all by surprise and with many doubts.

In the meantime, all I can do is remember what El Universal has meant in my life. I remember that as a little girl I would run out to the front door every morning to pick up the El Universal the delivery man had tossed there before dawn.

I learned to read with El Universal. When I was about five they took me to the eye doctor because my face would turn black from pressing the paper almost against my nose to read it. That was when they discovered I had almost 5 diopters of myopia, and I began wearing my “magnifying glasses,” which to this day are my lifelong companions. Whenever I pick up my glasses I remember El Universal, and for as long as I can remember I have not spent a day of my life without reading it. If I do the math, that is more than 15,000 days of reading it.

Then I remember my excitement when I first walked into the El Universal building. I was studying social communication at the Central University of Venezuela, and our professors sent us there to do various assignments and interviews. Not to mention the hours I spent in the newspaper archive going through its issues from 1900 onward. It was a passion; the hours flew by as I read news that had become history.

I never applied for a formal job there, because right after graduating I got married and devoted myself to my home and my six children. But I wrote letters to the editor, and they always published them, until in 2011, when I had more time to write every week, they allowed me to have my weekly Wednesday column, which truly changed my life.

In just three years of writing every week for this paper I have met thousands of people in Venezuela and around the world who also make a habit of reading El Universal every day. In just three years my Twitter account passed 10,000 followers, hundreds of readers write to me about my articles, and some have even sent me gifts from Europe. The messages of support and encouragement I receive through their words, in the hard moments our nation has lived through, are priceless.

At the canonization of John Paul II in Rome, several journalists from different parts of the world told me of their great admiration for this paper, which has always stayed faithful to the truth and respected freedom of expression.

I thank God because through my column I was able to give hope and encouragement to so many Venezuelans who are here fighting for a better Venezuela. I also give thanks because through my column I was able to speak about the faith of Venezuelans, to defend my holy Catholic Church, and in recent months to pass on Pope Francis’s outspoken messages, especially those about corruption, about the lives of the corrupt and the terrible harm they do to society and to their own families, and, most important of all, that we must pray a great deal for them so that they may be converted, give back everything they stole and be saved.

Without a doubt it has been a wonderful opportunity to be able to write here. God grant that this continues with the change, and that El Universal’s new owners respect freedom of expression as has been done until now. That was one of the main commitments the paper’s new president made to its journalists.

God grant that professionalism and freedom of expression continue to reign at El Universal. We must trust that it will be so. And as Elides says, only experience of what happens will decide whether we keep working and writing for this great newspaper. And let us remember that it is a great newspaper not because of what it cost in money, but because of the journalists and staff inside it.

Depending on how the editorial policy is handled, it will be its readers who in the end decide whether or not they remain faithful to what was founded 105 years ago.

God bless you all, and we keep going forward even if the slope is steep and sometimes slippery, as our dear Brother Ginés used to say. He, too, was a faithful reader of El Universal.