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| 45 YEARS OF THE MAJORCA DAILY BULLETIN
The beginning...
The first issue of the Majorca Daily Bulletin appeared on December 31, 1962, a date that always puzzles people. Why launch a paper on the last day of the year when you can wait for 24 hours and start the new year with a new paper?
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| Text: Andrew Valente y Jason Moore, Photo: Majorca Daily Bulletin |
The date was deliberately chosen because it is one of the most significant in Majorcan history: the day in 1229 when King Jaime I fought and defeated the Moors and expelled them from the island, thereby founding the Kingdom of Majorca.
But, in fact, the Majorca Daily Bulletin really started several years before that when Pedro Serra, a young reporter on the Baleares newspaper, was visionary enough to see that there was scope for daily news in English for the island’s foreign visitors.
Those were very early days for the young Pedro Serra, and he didn’t have the resources to launch his own daily newspaper. So he used the only option that was available to him: he organised a page of English news in the Spanish-language Baleares newspaper. It was an extremely modest star, and at the time no one, not even Pedro, realised what it would lead to. | |
| A few years later, Pedro was in a position to launch a publication of his own: a bright and breezy weekly sports magazine called Fiesta Deportiva. By this time he also had his own little publishing house, Imprenta Atlante, which brought out novels and books of poetry that had won the City of Palma annual literary prizes.
The page of English news in Baleares didn’t last for very long, but with it Pedro had sown a seed that began to sprout when his highly popular Fiesta Deportiva sports publication was up and running. He still didn’t have the resources to start a daily newspaper, but he had an old flatbed printing press and a linotype machine that were underused.
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The germinating daily newspaper seed now put out roots in another way: Pedro decided to keep his machines and printers busy by launching a weekly newspaper in English. That was when I first met him and with Pedro at the helm, and with the help of other journalists and writers such as Philip Jerome and bill Karakas, we took two or three days to produce the weekly. It was launched as Fiesta Mallorquina but that name was later changed to Te Mallorca Times.
But the original idea of having a daily source of news for foreign visitors never went away. Two years later, when The Majorcan Times was well established, Pedro decided to take the plunge and start a daily newspaper. The first step was applying to the Ministry of Information and Tourism for a licence. | |
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