CONTRIBUTION
Month after month, the pages of Quercus offer the latest news in ecology and conservation biology, drawn always from the most reliable sources. It is without doubt the “doyen” of the Spain’s environmental press, in the words of the award jury. The magazine was born in 1981 amid the “ferment” of the country’s democratic transition, explains director Rafael Serra.
These were also the years of a burgeoning ecologist movement in Spain, and Quercus became a channel “for all that activity, and all those concerns.” From 1988 to 2013, the magazine was brought out by a powerful editing group, América Ibérica, but this support was withdrawn in the throes of the crisis and Serra, together with editor-in-chief José Antonio Montero, and design director Miguel Miralles, decided to acquire the Quercus name and take over its publication.
“It was pretty nerve-racking,” Serra relates, “but we were determined to keep Quercus alive. And in a sense we have returned to the spirit of those first years; to a magazine that is put together almost artisanally, with next to no advertising and relying basically on the support of buyers and subscribers.” Today’s magazine has a circulation of some 15,000 copies. However its impact is considerably greater, given that 700 of its subscribers are collective customers like libraries, universities and NGOs.
It owes much of its success to the fact that its main sources are “the people encountering environmental stories at first hand: NGOs, the scientific and technological communities and also incidental observers,” says Montero. That and “an unstinting commitment to nature conservation,” which the magazine’s editorial team shares with its readership.