El Espectador

El Espectador (meaning "The Spectator") is a newspaper with national circulation within Colombia, founded by Fidel Cano Gutiérrez on 22 March 1887 in Medellín and published since 1915 in Bogotá. It was initially published twice a week, 500 issues each, but some years later became a daily paper. As the oldest newspaper in Colombia still in circulation, El Espectador is considered a newspaper of record for Colombia and a home for prominent writers, including the 1982 Nobel Prize Laurete Gabriel García Márquez. It is a member of the Inter American Press Association and the Asociación de Diarios Colombianos (ANDIARIOS). It defined itself as a "political, literary, news, and industrial newspaper". In 2001, during a financial crisis, It transitioned into a weekly release, but reverted to a daily release on May 11, 2008, a comeback which had long been rumoured. With this change, it now utilized a 28 centimetres (11 in) by 39.5 centimetres (15.6 in) tabloid format. From 1997, the majority shareholder of El Espectador has been Valores Bavaria S.A., now known as Valorem S.A., a holding company controlled by the Santo Domingo family. The Cano family, founders of the newspaper, retained a small percentage amounting to less than 1%. Since 2001, the paper has used the slogan "El Espectador. Opinion is news", implying it now focuses on opinion articles, as opposed to breaking news. This focus was kept when it regained its daily format on 2008. According to the Estudio General de Medios, El Espectador had 687,900 weekly readers in 2007.