The journalist and writer Álex Grijelmo (Burgos, 70 years old) has been elected member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) for the o chair, at the plenary session held this afternoon at the entity’s headquarters in Madrid. Grijelmo feels, as he told EL PAÍS, “happily obliged to work within the institution, to be a participant in its debates and to assume its decisions. And above all to disseminate them.” His candidacy had been presented by Juan Luis Cebrián, the first director of EL PAÍS and later president of Prisa; and two linguists, José Antonio Pascual, professor of Spanish Language, and Salvador Gutiérrez Ordóñez, professor of General Linguistics.
Grijelmo will occupy the chair left vacant by the architect Antonio Fernández de Alba, who died in May 2024. Regarding his contribution to the RAE, the new member highlighted in conversation with this newspaper: “My experience in communication and also in management. And outside the institution, perhaps my point of view regarding style, in the idea that one thing is correct and another is what is considered elegant, cultured, precise.”
Among the main threats to the Spanish language are, he warns, “the educational plans of recent decades, which have been relegating knowledge of the language and care for writing.” For example, many of his students at the UAM-EL PAÍS School of Journalism do not handle theoretical concepts such as grammatical ellipsis, or Spanish politicians use a “semi-cultured language with frequent syntactic inconsistencies.” In that, he says, it is a pleasure to hear from some Latin American leaders.
Grijelmo is the author of fifteen books on journalism and language, a reference for those who want to dedicate themselves to the profession of journalist or practice it, among which the following stand out: The journalist’s style (Taurus, 1997), Passionate defense of the Spanish language (Taurus, 1998), The seduction of words (Taurus, 2000), The tip of the tongue (Aguilar, 2004), The genius of language (Taurus, 2004), Double-edged words (Espasa, 2015), Proposal for agreement on inclusive language (Taurus, 2019) y with the tongue out (Taurus, 2021). His latest publication is The perversion of anonymity (Taurus, 2024). In it he addresses how anonymity on social networks encourages criminal behavior.
Furthermore, with the philologist Pilar García Mouton, he published dying words (Taurus, 2011) and with the RAE academic and novelist José María Merino, The strength of the Spanish and how to defend it (Taurus, 2019).
Grijelmo began his career at the Burgos newspaper The Voice of Castile, where he published his first article at the age of 16. In 1977 he was hired by the Europa Press agency. Doctor in Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid, he completed the senior business management program (PADE) at the IESE business school.
In 1983 he joined EL PAÍS, where he held several positions of responsibility until 2022, including deputy director with Javier Moreno at the head of the newspaper. He has been editor-in-chief of the Madrid, Edition, Society, Sports and Sunday sections. He has been responsible since 1989 for the Stylebook from EL PAÍS, which has become a manual for the practice of good journalism and correct language.
In 2000 he became director of the chain of local and regional newspapers that were then owned by Grupo Prisa (publishing company of EL PAÍS), and in 2002 he was appointed general director of Content at Prisa Internacional (a division that included press, radio and television media in Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, Chile, Panama and Costa Rica).
His career at EL PAÍS and Prisa had a parenthesis during which he presided over the Efe agency (2004-2012), a stage in which he created the Fundéu, the foundation that ensures the proper use of language in the media. During that period he also chaired the World Council of Agencies for three years.
In May 2012 he rejoined Prisa Noticias as director of International Development, and in 2013 he was appointed deputy to the then director of EL PAÍS, Javier Moreno. He has also been director of the UAM-EL PAÍS School of Journalism between 2018 and 2020. Subsequently, he has been deputy director in Javier Moreno’s second stage as director. He currently writes a weekly column in the newspaper’s cultural supplement, in which, under the heading of the tip of the tonguedeals, with humor, with the inaccuracies in the language that it finds in the Spanish media.
His long experience in the media leads him to pay special attention to the increase in the use of Anglicisms in journalism, “an effort by communicators to present English as a more elegant clothing, which comparatively degrades Spanish.” Grijelmo cites a statistic prepared in 2020 by computational linguist Elena Álvarez Mellado for the Fundéu that shows that eight main Spanish digital media publish about 400 Anglicisms every day. “All this increases our inferiority complex with respect to what comes to us from outside. If one believes oneself superior to another, that does not mean one is superior to him. But if one believes oneself inferior to another, at that moment one already is,” explains the journalist.