2025 Candidate for Vice-Presidency: Marta Barcenilla
Who I am
I am a journalist and unionist half and a half, I was born in Palencia (Spain) in 1975. I lived and studied there until 1995 when I moved to Salamanca to study journalism in a Pontificia University in Salamanca (Spain).
After that I returned to Palencia to start to work in different positions in Diario Palentino, then move to Toledo, to work on La Tribuna; came back to Castilla y León to work in ICAL regional news agency, where my journalist work is actually.
In 2007 I moved to Madrid to work in CCOO to start to build Media Sector on this industrial union, the biggest socio-political organization in Spain, with more than 950.000 affiliates, 230.000 on Citizen Services Federation, in which i was Institutional Affairs responsive and Finantial and Humman Resource FSC-CCOO Journalist Association co-chair.
Why I am standing
Equality, labour rights, press freedom and quality jobs are key words in my life, because I decided a long time ago that journalism is not possible without equality and quality jobs. I am absolutely convinced that every journalist needs to be secure and to cover his or her basic needs in order to do real journalism, to defend and practise press freedom and to consider our profession as a public good, because that’s what I think we are, regardless of the ownership of the television, newspaper, radio or web page in which we work.
All forms of precariousness, from low pay to bogus freelance work, the absence of collective bargaining, copyright or censorship, are the main issues we need to combat, from my point of view, always adopting a gender and youth perspective, because they are the most precarious collective in journalism.
My priorities for the EFJ
I want to continue to work to take care of our young journalists by offering them a future with a good salary, copyright, security and a guarantee of working in a genuine environment of press freedom; to offer our older colleagues good retirement conditions and to look into the eyes of my female colleagues to ask them all never again to have to choose between being a mother, editor-in-chief, war correspondent, business or sports editor or being a journalist.
We’ve got a lot of work to do, so let’s get to work!
