The Red News

A Newspaper for the Most Inopportune Campaign

Context

An electoral campaign launched on July 7th, right as San Fermín hits its stride — the day no one in Pamplona is thinking about candidates, posters, or rallies, only about the bull run, breakfast, the procession, giants and big-heads, kalimotxo, the peñas, dancing, the hangover. The timing itself was the problem: a campaign genuinely out of place, out of season, beside the point. The challenge was how to comment on that absurdity without becoming another piece of political noise — using humor as a way to push back intelligently and peacefully, without wounding anyone, in the tradition of satirical press like Charlie Hebdo, Le Canard Enchaîné, El Jueves, or Mongolia.

Authorship note: this work was carried out at Errea, where I work under contract.

Result

The studio printed and distributed an ephemeral street newspaper, The Red News: tabloid format, 16 pages, a single color — red, the color of San Fermín — and sized to be carried the way runners traditionally carry a rolled newspaper to gauge their distance from the bulls during the encierro. Printed on July 3rd and handed out free in Pamplona’s streets on July 7th, the day the campaign began, it mixed illustrated comics and galaxies, a real (if not entirely serious) political conversation between two philosophers-turned-politicians, contributions from local writers and photographers, satirical horoscopes for the candidates written by ChatGPT, and infographics comparing party headquarters’ proximity to bars and the relative noise levels of politics versus the fiestas — a deliberate, cheerful mess, fitting for the moment it was mocking.