Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación. 15 June 2019 /15 September 2019, nº 147, 139-140
                             ISSN: 1575-2844 http://doi.org/10.15178/va.2019.147.139-140


REPORT

 ASK TO WRITE. CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERVIEWS-PROFILE
 OF ANTONIO LÓPEZ HIDALGO AT THE NEWSPAPER CÓRDOBA
                         (2007-2015)
                     Maria José Ufarte
            Deputation of Córdoba: Córdoba, 2016

Lidia Peralta García, Faculty of Journalism, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain.
lidia.peralta@uclm.es

   The journalist and professor María José Ufarte Ruiz analyzes journalistic
interviews in this book, a genre that is as difficult to do as it is to explain, based on
rich experience and a truly praiseworthy practical demonstration. The work is
written with argumentative exquisiteness and is full of great exhaustive content,
which extends over more than 600 pages, which present the long career of journalist
Antonio López Hidalgo, who has brought readers the most illustrious personalities
of the moment. And he has done it in a close and agile way. “The author does not get
a series of statements from his interlocutors, but interviews to draw and portray the
character. He asks to write” (p. 19), explains Ufarte Ruiz justifying the title of her
publication, which is full of illustrations by Miguel Ángel León and Elisa Arroyo and
contains winks of up-to-date relevance.

   The volume is structured in seven major chapters, which follow a logical, temporal
and thematic order and approach the journalistic interview from different
perspectives. After the exemplary prologue written by María Jesús Casals Carro,
Professor of Journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid, and the
introduction, where research is duly presented, the book begins with “Antonio López
Hidalgo, the passion for journalism” (Chapter I), which focuses on the life and work
of the author, placing them in the respective historical environment.

   In the second chapter, with the title “Studies on the interview”, the author
analyzes this genre from a conceptual point of view, emphasizing the different
definitions and typologies proposed by the various authors. For this, she uses a
bibliographic review that helps to establish a theoretical frame of reference. In this
block, the journalist also traces the different opinions of the textual structure of the
interviews, which is basically composed of the intro, the beginning itself or
introduction, the questions-answer and the end or closing.

   Although Antonio López Hidalgo cultivates this genre since his first incursions
into the profession, the fact is that it is the pages of the newspaper Córdoba and the
supplement Zoco which show to a greater extent the author's mastery at the time of
interviewing. For this reason, in the third chapter, “The journalistic interviews of
Antonio López Hidalgo”, Ufarte Ruiz analyzes the interviú in the dean of the
Cordoba provincial press. She begins by approaching the clear and direct language as

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Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación. 15 June 2019/15 September 2019, nº 147, 139-140
Report: Ask to write. Critical analysis of interviews-profile of Antonio López Hidalgo at the newspaper
                                          Córdoba (2007-2015)


well as the respectful, though at times daring, precise and impeccable style of López
Hidalgo, to later move on to the different structural elements. This way, she shows
his particular way of framing the presentation of the dialogues, the meticulous
descriptions he makes of the interviewees, the place and the environment that
surround the journalistic meeting. She also reflects on the way in which the questions
are formulated.

   The results of research are located in the fourth part of the work, titled “To finish”,
where the journalist and professor of the UCLM explains that the interviews-profile
of López Hidalgo explore a new way, far from the convections and the pre-
established formulas. The fifth block, called “Annex”, contains in a schematic way
the interviews published in the newspaper Córdoba and in the supplements Zoco and
Cuadernos del Sur throughout the nine years of research. The sixth chapter is devoted
to the bibliography.

   Finally, the book compiles in the seventh chapter, called “Interviews and
interviewed. Anthology of interviews-profile, by Antonio López Hidalgo”, the 45
profile interviews analyzed in the preceding pages. Each one with its particular name
and way of being, with the memory of its gestation and birth recorded in the resistant
skin of the printed paper, but all carriers of the DNA of their parent. An intimate and
personal stamp of excellent journalist and brainy transmitter of knowledge that
María José Ufarte Ruiz defines in the introduction as follows: “The analysis of his
production reveals a great technical capacity that distinguishes him from others (...).
The characters he interviews acquire a different perspective with him and the words
he uses in his writing teach more than a treatise on history. That is his hallmark, in
addition to the commitment he has with the reader and the truth” (p. 23).

   Of all this gives ample account, with a scientific method and profusion of
arguments, the journalist and professor at the UCLM, a young but experienced
member of the research group on the Influences of Genders and Technologies in
Social Communication at the University of Seville, author of several books on the
exercise of journalism in these troubled times. One of them, the one entitled An office
that is going away. The challenge of traditional journalism facing the economic crisis of 2015,
signed together with Antonio López Hidalgo.

                                                                    Lidia Peralta García
                              Facultad de Periodismo, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha




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Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación. 15 June 2019/15 September 2019, nº 147, 139-140