EFE AGENCY and José Luis López Aranguren Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities 1995

The award to the EFE Agency aims to acknowledge the work of various generations of media professionals who have managed to make it one of the big five world-wide information agencies, and the premier Spanish language agency. A highly important communications link between Spain and Latin America, as well as between the various Spanish-speaking countries, it expanded its services by with the setting-up of a news service in Arabic.

The EFE Agency is an international news agency, founded in 1939 in Spain by Ramón Serrano Súñer and Manuel Aznar Zubigaray. EFE is a multimedia information company, with more than three thousand professionals from 60 countries, covering all areas of information in the different media (the written press, radio, television and the Internet) and distributes 3 million news items per year to more of two thousand media on the five continents via a network of journalists worldwide, operating 24 hours a day from more than 180 cities in 110 countries and with four editing desks in Madrid, Bogotá, Cairo (Arabic) and Rio de Janeiro (Portuguese). It was the first Spanish agency to have delegations in all Spain’s autonomous communities and cities, contributing to the development of a nationwide information network.

In 1980, it created the so-called Department for Urgent Spanish to unify criteria and standards, as well as to avoid linguistic dispersion and the indiscriminate use of neologisms in Spanish, an issue of special importance in the media. The department is made up of linguists and philologists, along with the Style Advisory Board composed of members of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), professors of Philology and journalists. Its main tool is the Urgent Spanish Manual (Spanish acronym, MEU), the EFE Agency style manual, which is a very popular manual of Spanish usage, first published in 1976. At present, it has been constituted in the so-called Foundation for Urgent Spanish (FUNDÉU). In addition to these services, the Agency has developed one of the few public access databases in Spain (EFE-DATA) and also produces radio and television news programmes, which are currently distributed and broadcast in Spain and Latin America.

In 2009, it received the Via Appia Award for informative transparency for environmental journalism programmes.

José Luis López Aranguren (Ávila, Spain, 1909 – Madrid, Spain, 1996) is a graduate in Law and a Doctor of Philosophy and Arts from the University of Madrid, was Professor of Ethics and Sociology, he was one of the most highly-regarded philosophers in Spanish society, due to his critical and rigorous character and his great capacity for both communication and work. Forced away from Spanish universities for ten years for political reasons (together with Tierno Galván and García Calvo), he was re-instated by the amnesty of 1976 and retired in 1980. At times in his life he was a visiting lecturer at the universities of Texas, Indiana and California (USA) and at the Danish University of Aarhus. He was, furthermore, emeritus professor of the University of California at Santa Barbara and has lectured in various North American, French, English, German and Italian universities.

An assiduous contributor to the Spanish daily press, he wrote a great number of essays, which began with La filosofía de Eugenio d`Ors, and among which, we may single out titles such as Ética y política or La comunicación humana. His complete works have been published.

A finalist for the National Essay Prize in 1979, he was awarded the National Literature Prize in 1989. Among the many distinctions bestowed upon him, José Luis López Aranguren received the Grand Cross of Alfonso X the Wise, the Gold Medal of Sant Jordi and the Gold Medal of the Region of Madrid. Furthermore, he was a doctor honoris causa of the Carlos III University in Madrid.