What is ABC?
ABC is a conservative, monarchist and Catholic Spanish daily newspaper with eleven editions in Spain, including Madrid and Seville. According to the General Media Study, it has a readership of 660,000, including both its print and online editions.
History
It was founded in Madrid on 1 January 1903 by Torcuato Luca de Tena y Álvarez-Ossorio. It was originally a weekly newspaper and began to be distributed on a daily basis from 1 June 1905.
In the context of the First World War, it maintained a Germanophile position. During the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, it was among the group of publications that supported the regime. On 12 October 1929, ABC de Sevilla was born, to which ABC de Madrid contributed its doctrine, texts and even the rotogravure pages.
The Spanish Civil War meant that each edition of the newspaper was on a different side in the war: ABC de Madrid on the Republican side and ABC de Sevilla on the pro-Republican side.
In 1938 its distribution barely reached 10,000 copies a day, and at the beginning of 1939 the newspaper consisted of a four-page booklet. At the end of the civil war, ABC was returned to its original owners by the winning side led by Francisco Franco and was once again the best-selling newspaper in Spain.
The Press Law of 22 April 1938, the work of Ramón Serrano Suñer, suppressed the Republican press, turning the remaining press into an institution at the service of the State, a transmitter of official values and an instrument of political indoctrination. In this context, ABC became one of the most important newspapers for the support of the dictatorship.
In democracy, ABC was revived under the direction of Luis María Anson. Some authors have pointed out its ideological and editorial closeness to the Partido Popular, and formerly to Alianza Popular. Thus, in 2005 it was the third best-selling newspaper in Spain and the oldest in Madrid.
In 2009, the official presentation was made of the documentary collection housed at ABC.es, which is available to the public free of charge, and which contains five million pages, including, in addition to the more than 60,000 issues of the newspaper published to date in the Madrid and Seville editions, the pages of magazines and supplements of the historic newspaper.
The owner of ABC reduces its losses by 40% in the first half of the year
Vocento accelerated in the second quarter of 2017, despite the lame performance of the daily ABC. The publishing company reported a loss of 2.4 million euros in the first half of the year, 39.7% less than in the same period of 2016, when it lost 4 million euros.