English biography

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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 Diari de Barcelona and TVE (Spanish public TV) newsrooms where he specialized in international politics. As a reporter and correspondent, Partal covered events around the world, among others the fall of the Berlin Wall, the USSR coup d’état and the independence of the Baltic countries, the Balkan War, the revolt of the students in Beijing, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the beginning of Palestinian autonomy, the conflict in Kurdistan or several elections in the United States.

In 1994 he created the first Internet news system of the Catalan Countries called El Temps Online. In 1995, together with Assumpció Maresma, director of the newspaper at the time, he founded the first electronic newspaper in Catalan, VilaWeb. The same year he created with Jordi Vendrell the program L’Internauta on Catalunya Ràdio.

Currently, he is the director of the electronic newspaper VilaWeb. In addition to publishing daily the editorial of VilaWeb, he writes once a week in Berria and Nós Diario.

He published the books 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 to understand the evolution of the pro-independence moviment in Catalonia, A un pam de la independència (2013), Desclassificat 9-N (2015) and Nou Homenatge a Catalunya (2017).

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 the news media by staging a fake coup d’état in the Soviet Union.

He has been awarded 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 (2004). The same year VilaWeb was awarded the National Journalism Award, “to 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.

He is Chairman of The Board of Directors of the European Journalism Centre, based in Maastricht, a continent-wide professional organization that works to promote quality journalism in Europe and to assimilate the great technological and cultural changes that accompany the digitalization of the media.

He is also academic member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, the Catalan Institute of Sciences and Humanities.