Vicent Partal i Montesinos (Bétera, Camp de Túria, November 28, 1960) is the director of VilaWeb. He has also worked at El Temps, El Punt, Diari de Barcelona, Catalunya Ràdio, La Vanguardia, and TVE, among others. He is considered one of the pioneers of the Internet in the Catalan Countries.
Vicent Partal studied to become a teacher at the University of Valencia and worked at Escola Gavina.
Co-founder of the weekly magazine El Temps in 1983, he was part of the newsrooms of Diari de Barcelona and TVE (Spanish public TV), where he specialized in international politics. As a reporter and correspondent, Partal covered global events, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the USSR coup d’état, the independence of the Baltic countries, the Balkan War, the student uprising in Beijing, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the beginning of Palestinian autonomy, the conflict in Kurdistan, and several elections in the United States.
In 1994, he created the first Internet news service in the Catalan Countries, El Temps Online. In 1995, together with Assumpció Maresma, then the director of the newspaper, he founded the first electronic newspaper in Catalan, VilaWeb. That same year, he created the program L’Internauta on Catalunya Ràdio with Jordi Vendrell.
Currently, he is the director of the electronic newspaper VilaWeb.
He has published several books, including Catalunya en l’estratègia militar d’Occident (1987), Els nacionalistes a l’URSS (1988), La revolta nacionalista a l’URSS (1991), Atles de l’Europa futura (1991), Catalunya 3.0 (2001), 11-M: El periodisme en crisi (2004, with Martxelo Otamendi), and Periodisme quàntic. In June 2009, he published Llibreta de Pequín, the first commercial e-book in Catalan without a printed edition.
He has also published three key books on the evolution of the Catalan pro-independence movement: A un pam de la independència (2013), Desclassificat 9-N (2015), and Nou Homenatge a Catalunya (2017).
In 2022, he published the book Fronteres (Borders), an essay on the influence of borders on global politics, culture, and society, which also includes 35 short narratives about particularly significant borders.
Regarding television, he is the author of the series Hem fet el sud and the program Una llengua que camina, a co-production between VilaWeb and TVC about Escola Valenciana. He was also the scriptwriter of the controversial TVE program Camaleó, which criticized news media by staging a fake coup d’état in the Soviet Union.
He has received several awards, including the City of Barcelona Award for Journalism (1999) and the National Internet Award (2000). In 2004, he was awarded the Nadal Batle i Nicolau Prize for New Information Technologies. That same year, VilaWeb received the National Journalism Award “for the portal and its creators, Vicent Partal and Assumpció Maresma, for the foundational nature of their work in the field of digital journalism, which combines rigor, immediacy, analysis, and diversity.” In 2008, he received the Miquelet d’Honor, and in 2015, the Valencian of the Year Award, granted by the Huguet Foundation.
Between 2016 and 2024, he served as the president of the Board of Directors of the European Journalism Centre, based in Maastricht, a continent-wide professional organization that promotes quality journalism in Europe and helps media adapt to the great technological and cultural changes brought about by digitalization.
He is also an academic member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the Catalan Institute of Sciences and Humanities.