It makes sense that the LaSexta column team is in the background on the left in the La Sexta newsroom. Especially to the left. They refer to themselves as “the Sixth Commune,” almost like a Gallic village that refuses to devote time to journalism amid the speed and haste generated by the current television empire. Apart from the daily hustle and bustle, several boards full of notes with markers of different colors according to an internal code serve to bring order to a program that works like an assembly line, in which each element is treated with the care of a goldsmith’s work. . This Friday and after more than 11 years on the air with an average of 1.1 million viewers since its inception, the laSexta column reaches 400 programs with a program very representative of its essence: a special on the final cessation of the civil war. the communist leader Julián Grimau. When EL PAÍS visits the editors of the program this Wednesday, they are still working on a delivery that, like every week, will not be ready until Friday afternoon, a few hours before the broadcast.
Carlos Pastor is its director and gives voice to the reports that air every Friday at 9:30 p.m. He coordinates a team of 23 people including editing, production, writing, journalists/screenwriters, documentarians, filmmakers and cameras, in addition to the support they receive from the chain’s delegations. They begin work on each topic an average of four weeks in advance, with exceptions such as historical affairs programs, which typically begin months in advance. These are unusual rhythms on television and in journalism.
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Based on the topics chosen and agreed with the news department, an editor proposes the structure of the space and it will be divided into four blocks in which the journalists will work, before the team of interviewers looks for names that will give a face to the matter. This work will result in reorganizing the board and later marrying the sight and sound from the script notes. In parallel, Pastor records the voiceover narrating the program in a booth located in the same newsroom, nicknamed “the broom” because of its small size. Right next door, the editor Jesús Chinchilla worked with the journalist Xavi Burgos on issue 400 this Wednesday. “This is the quarters and changing room, we cut and sew,” explains the editor. As a practical example, they have over 20 hours of recording time for this Friday’s broadcast, plus the historical archive footage they will be incorporating. “We emit less than 10% of everything we collect,” says Burgos.
Carlos Pastor, director and speaker of “laSexta columna”, in the Álvaro García lecture room
All the members of the laSexta column, learned from the news of the network, contribute their grain of sand to this great television assembly line, from Julián Díaz, historian and supermagnificent of Saber y Ganar, to Sol González, who worked as a screenwriter with Pepe Navarro or Azahara Sánchez, a law graduate. “We’ve been dealing with the issues for 11 years,” summarizes Pastor. The themes of the programs oscillate between the historical, the present or what they call “the excesses of capitalism”. On the board where they list the topics for each week, they write the average viewership for the channel and its airing alongside it. They know that topical issues work best, which is why sometimes plans change and they have to put together an entire program in a matter of days and against the clock. The most extreme case, Pastor recalls, was the arrest of Rodrigo Rato: it happened on a Thursday, they went to work at eight in the evening and managed to finish the program for the same Friday, although at that time they had time in sleep in a hotel near work
When choosing the topics, they are strongly guided by the interest that they arouse in their own writing. “At the beginning of the Casado en el PP era, we made a program that we thought would be interesting to know where it came from. When we started doing it, we found that it was very boring and the program didn’t go down well with the audience. We’ve decided that if we do 37 or 38 programs a year, we’re going to try to make them about subjects that we enjoy, learn about, and are passionate about. Otherwise they get boring for the viewer as well,” explains Pastor. This also applies to his search for interlocutors who are not so well known to the general public. “The secondary characters answer more and talk more freely,” says the journalist. Nor are they looking for statements that set trends. “We do wild journalism because it’s radical, but not because it’s extremist, but because we’re trying to get to the root of the problem,” argues Pastor. Of course, she ensures that they are 100% free to choose and edit the topics, always with a strong editorial line in defense of the public.
In the 400 programs the space now covers, Pastor commemorates milestones like the pursuit of Franco’s police officer Billy el Niño. He also acknowledges that some issues were not addressed due to delay or fear of not being up to the task. “We thought about addressing the Shakira issue [y la canción con Bizarrap con referencias a Piqué], I had to speak to philosophers to explain why WhatsApp groups suddenly burst on the subject. But we didn’t dare because we didn’t think we were going to do it right. After what happened with Ana Obregón, maybe we will do something about the political and transformative power of the heart,” he continues.
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