‘We don’t work to confirm the biases of our readers.’ Jan Martínez Ahrens on defending democracy in the age of junk information

El País published its first edition in 1976, less than six months after the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Its founder, José Ortega Spottorno, was the son of exiled philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and the great-grandson of newspaperman Eduardo Gasset y Artime. He wanted the newspaper to be the leading progressive voice in the country’s nascent free press.

In 1978 a new constitution established Spain as a democratic state. Less than three years later, members of the Civil Guard and the Spanish Army attempted a coup, holding parliamentarians hostage for 18 hours. As tanks took to the streets that February evening, El País was the country’s only paper to go to press. The headline on the front page was unequivocal: “‘El País’, con la constitución” (“El País, with the constitution”).

This act of integrity is one that Jan Martínez Ahrens, the current editor in chief, keeps front of mind. As he welcomes Monocle into his wood-panelled office in Madrid, he points at a framed copy of the 1981 front page that hangs on the wall. It was the first thing that he brought into the office when he took up the top job in 2025.

“This is a newspaper that has always had deeply held political views,” he says. “We are independent. We believe in diversity and are a progressive paper.” In the calm of his library-like office, he sits on a black leather sofa. The shelves here are filled with novels, books on newspaper design, El País style guides and magazines including The Economist.

Today, Martínez Ahrens is wearing a navy suit over a light-blue shirt and brown suede moccasin boots. He describes his sartorial style as “formal-casual”. It serves him well as he moves between meals and meetings, and takes the stairs to the newsroom, where his team prepares the day’s stories. “There are some places where it’s still necessary to wear a tie but I feel that etiquette has relaxed a bit – though Mexico demands more formality,” he says. El País has about 400 journalists working from its Spanish base, as well as newsrooms in Brussels, Mexico City and Washington, with correspondents elsewhere. The paper publishes six digital international editions that cover Latin America, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina and the US in separate Spanish-and English-language versions. Almost all of the foreign editions are led by local journalists, helping to ensure that El País has authority as a paper offering a broader view of the world.

After starting his career at the publication in 1992, Martínez Ahrens spent almost 10 years living in Mexico City, first as the correspondent for the region and later as editor in chief of El País América. He recalls his time in Mexico fondly – as is evident from the mementos that are scattered around his office, including an alebrije (a Mexican folk sculpture) and mugs emblazoned with wrestling-mask designs.

Between 1992 and 2014, Martínez Ahrens went from being a freelance journalist at El País to heading sections including Sociedad, covering issues such as the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Spain in 2005. During Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, he was based in Washington as the newspaper’s US correspondent. Then, in 2020, he helped El País to transition to the digital space with its first digital-subscription model, under the then editor in chief, Soledad Gallego-Díaz.

The daily online audience for El País has since grown to about four million and the publication now has over 490,000 subscribers across all its editions. Today only the Spanish edition is printed and El País offers a hybrid monthly subscription (at a cost of €25) that combines digital access with the delivery of its weekend print editions and magazine supplements.

Despite the impressive numbers, El País’s parent company, Grupo Prisa, faces a debt of about €779m, which it has agreed to repay by 2029. This was mostly accumulated just before the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, as a result of overspending on TV and radio projects. In March 2026, Grupo Prisa announced a plan to boost the revenue of its media arm, which encompasses El País, to €520m over the next three years – up from the €430m that it earned in 2025. Its projections include an increase of the newspaper’s overall subscribers to 800,000, with plans for further expansion into Latin America.

While Martínez Ahrens tells Monocle that he can’t speak about Grupo Prisa’s ambitions, he highlights the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that those holding the conglomerate’s debt have no influence over El País’s editorial stance. These include a code of conduct and having journalists from the paper on El País’s board of directors. “The editor in chief has veto power over everything that is published, including ads,” he says.

The coming months will be challenging for the team. The Spanish housing crisis has resulted in widespread protests and the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has called a snap election that will be held at the end of November. “Spain faces the possibility that, for the first time in our democracy, the far right will govern – though, according to polls, it would do so as a partner of the [right-wing] People’s Party,” says Martínez Ahrens. “The Spanish far right has shown itself to be more radical than [the followers of] Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni. It’s foreseeable that the public discourse will be radically polarised with such a result.”

Critics accuse El País of aligning itself with the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which is currently in government. “That has been used to attempt to discredit the newspaper but the answer can be found on our front page and our website,” says Martínez Ahrens. “We don’t answer to a particular party. We answer to our convictions and the journalistic path that we have forged.”

The editor in chief links the growing public distrust of mainstream newspapers to “the crisis suffered by the media between 2008 and 2010, when the 19th-century print model – which we viewed as linear and easy because it made us money based on newsstand sales – fell apart”. “Some thought that they could simply apply the same model to the digital landscape, in which a high number of subscribers would result in high economic returns,” he adds. “That resulted in a string of failures and weakened lots of titles. And it led many down a terrible path of reliance on clickbait.”

This year, El País reached its 50th anniversary. Martínez Ahrens partly attributes its longevity to its refusal to publish “información basura” – low-quality information that he compares to junk food. Instead, the team focuses on separating fact from opinion. Regardless of changes in the industry, the editor in chief is clear about his publication’s responsibilities. “We don’t work to confirm the biases of our readers,” he says. “A newspaper’s duty is to do good journalism.”