The failure of the Francoist Movement Press Group to convert "La Voz de Castilla" into a prototype to save its newspapers

Abstract

The situation of the Press Group of the Francoist Movement was, by 1970, very worrying. Half of its newspaper titles, among which La Voz de Castilla (1945-1976), were recording substantial losses and low circulation rates. A marketing study stands out among the measures that the National Press Delegation took to relaunch this newspaper, the conclusions of which it intended to apply to other newspapers of the press group facing similar circumstances. This hitherto unknown marketing study is brought to light in this paper through an in-depth study of the causes that contributed to the failure of the Francoist Movement press, in a context marked by economic development and greater press freedom enshrined in the Ley de Prensa e Imprenta [Press Law of 1966]. The marketing study, with some results that could be extrapolated to other failing newspapers of the network, was a damp squib. It was withheld from the management of the Burgos newspaper and never applied. Readers turned their backs on La Voz de Castilla, because of its markedly ideological stance and because it was so closely controlled from Madrid that they considered it was not defending the interests of Burgos.