While the journalist examines power and asks questions, the institutional communicator works to explain and defend the message of an institution; confusing both roles ends up blurring the social function of journalism.
Saturday, February 7, 2026. The call for a municipal pool for Communication Technical Assistant at the Cartaya City Council and the statement from the Professional Association of Journalists of Andalusia warning of possible “intrusion” reopens an old unresolved debate within journalism itself. Not so much about that specific position —which in reality corresponds to institutional communication functions— as about something deeper: what exactly journalism is and what its professional field is today.
Let's summarize the story, without ambiguity. The governing team of the Cartaya City Council, of the PP, "creates" a civil servant position to place one of their own in communication tasks, with an ad hoc call for applications that, furthermore, guarantees the position in perpetuity when the populars are no longer those who govern the locality.
But the problem is not born in Cartaya. The episode only brings back to the table a confusion that has been brewing for decades within the profession itself (yes, profession): the identification between journalism and institutional communication.
The starting point is historical. For much of the 20th century, journalism was fundamentally understood as a profession linked to news media. University education in Spain did not arrive, and it did so late, until the last century. The first faculties of “Information Sciences” were created in the early seventies at the Complutense University, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the -private- University of Navarra. Before, the "academic training" of journalism refers to the Escuela de El Debate by Ángel Herrara Oria during the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, or the Escuela Oficial de Periodismo created by Francoism in 1941, both without "university" character. In Andalusia, analogous faculties did not exist until 1989 at the University of Seville, and 1992 at the University of Malaga. All of them, in their origins, already grouped under the same umbrella three distinct areas: journalism, advertising and public relations, and audiovisual communication.
Organization that responded to a logic of academic optimization more than of subsequent professional development. It was about studying social communication phenomena in a broad sense. However, over time that university framework ended up projecting itself onto the perception of the profession. Many students began to understand, and still do, that all those activities were part of the same professional field: “communication”. The problem is that, in practice, the logics of each of those activities are very different.
Journalism, in its classic formulation from the Acta Diurna of Julius Caesar (59 B.C.) to everything subsequent to the invention of the printing press (for example, in our country, the birth of The Journal of the Literati of Spain, in 1737), has a very specific social function: to observe, investigate and explain what the centers of power —political, economic, institutional, social...— do -as a priority- so that citizens can form an informed judgment. That is why journalism has always had a structurally tense relationship with power, because its function consists precisely in examining it. To establish itself, to claim -still- to be the fourth estate.
Institutional or corporate communication responds to a different logic. Its objective is to represent, explain or defend the position of an institution, a company or an organization. The institutional communication professional works to ensure that the message of that entity reaches public opinion in the most effective way possible.
From a technical point of view, both fields use very similar tools. One must write well, understand news timings, manage sources, know the media and master audiovisual and digital languages. But the direction of the work is opposite.
The journalist formulates questions to power.
The institutional communicator formulates answers on behalf of power.
For a long time, that difference was very clear within newsrooms. Press offices existed, but they were perceived as something else: one more source within the information ecosystem. The journalist could work with the information provided by an office, but knew that their function was not to simply reproduce it, but to cross-reference it, contextualize it, or question it. What has changed in recent decades is the balance between both worlds.
On the one hand, the number of communication cabinets has grown and is growing exponentially. Today, practically any public institution, company, or social entity has a communication department. Departments that produce an enormous amount of content: press releases, videos, photographs, social media publications, reports, campaigns, or events. In contrast, journalistic newsrooms have shrunk, are shrinking, and will continue to shrink. The economic crisis of the media, digital transformation, the irruption of AI, and the fall of traditional funding models have caused a notable decrease in staff in many newspapers, radio stations, and television channels. The result is an information ecosystem in which the institutional production of messages has increased while the journalistic capacity to analyze them has decreased.
In that context, for many communication students the most stable professional path is not in newsrooms, but in institutional or corporate cabinets. That labor reality also ends up influencing the perception of the professional field. If most of the job opportunities are found in communication departments, it is understandable that many graduates understand that space as a natural part of exercising "the profession". The problem appears when that perception ends up blurring the distinction between both roles.
When everything is simply called “communication”, journalism runs the risk of being diluted within a much broader field of message production. In that field, very different interests coexist: informing, persuading, promoting, defending an institutional image, or managing a reputational strategy.
None of that is illegitimate in itself. Institutions have the right to explain their policies and organizations to communicate their activities. But when these functions are confused with the exercise of journalism, the fundamental difference between producing messages and analyzing messages is lost sight of. That is why terminological confusion is not a simple semantic problem. It has consequences in the way the profession is conceived.
If everything is “communication”, the journalist ceases to be the one who critically observes institutions to become just another professional within the general content production circuit. And that displacement changes the very identity of journalism within society.
The controversy over the municipal position in the Huelva municipality of Cartaya precisely reflects that boundary. The advertised position is not intended for journalism, but for managing the communication of an administration. However, the public debate is framed in terms of “professional intrusion” within journalism.
And that's where the question that many veteran journalists ask themselves today appears: if institutional cabinets are considered part of the same professional field as journalism... who then remains outside the circuit of power to observe it with critical distance?
Perico Echevarría is editor and director of La Mar de Onuba.