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How to read a Spanish newspaper, and who publishes what
Press Spanish is a genuinely separate register, and the gap between it and the Spanish you have been learning is wider than in English. Three things do most of the damage to a learner. Sentences are long — a single Spanish news sentence can run sixty words with three subordinate clauses, where an English one would be broken into three. The passive is dense, in both its forms, so events arrive with no visible agent. And headlines are compressed to the point of telegraphy, with the verb deleted, so the first thing you read is the hardest. The compensation is that the vocabulary is stable. Spanish news writing reuses a fixed set of phrases — según fuentes, no ha trascendido, se prevé, cabe recordar, en declaraciones a este diario, el citado informe — and once you have met them you have met them for good. Learning twenty of these is worth more than a hundred nouns, and reading the same story in two papers is the fastest way to see them working. On the outlets themselves, since you will have to choose something to read. Spain has a highly politicised and fairly polarised press, and no paper is neutral. El País is centre-left and the best-known abroad; El Mundo is centre-right; ABC and La Razón are on the right; eldiario.es and Público on the left; La Vanguardia and El Periódico are Barcelona papers with a Catalan perspective; El Correo, Heraldo de Aragón and similar titles are strong regional papers that often cover local affairs better than the nationals. In broadcasting, RTVE is the state broadcaster, and each autonomous community has its own — TV3 in Catalonia, ETB in the Basque Country, Canal Sur in Andalusia — several of them broadcasting in the co-official languages of lesson 79. EFE is the national news agency, and if you notice the same wording in four papers at once, that is why. For learning purposes, three practical suggestions. Radio is better than print for your ears and worse for your comprehension, so start with a news bulletin you have already read about. RTVE publishes subtitled news and also a slow-Spanish service. And the sports and weather pages are the easiest reading in any newspaper in any language, which is not a trivial point: the vocabulary repeats, the structures are simple, and you will finish an article rather than abandoning it, which matters more at this stage than the subject does.