Alumni Breakfast Club with Oriol Duran: “I am very excited to come back to the university where I received my training”

On 29 March, a new Alumni Breakfast Club meeting, promoted by the UIC Barcelona Alumni & Careers Office, took place in the Aula Jardí. The secretary of Media and Broadcasting of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Oriol Duran, attended the event. Duran was a student in the first graduating class in Journalism and Humanities (1997-2001). Duran shared his career and experience with the attendees and gave a speech titled “Political communication: information and propaganda.” The event was introduced by Alberto Chinchilla, co-founder and director of BE SHARED, digital communication consultant, and member of the Alumni Board of Directors, who studied Journalism and Humanities at UIC Barcelona between 2003 and 2008.

“It is very exciting to come back to the University where you received your training,” Oriol Duran said as he began his speech. He highlighted the commitment to quality journalism: “I like journalism that is expensive, minority, laborious and annoying.” He also advocated for the role of propaganda, in the positive sense. “I am a great advocate of propaganda in its positive and ethical sense. I defend propaganda as a way of informing and providing clues on the work of government.”
Duran stressed the need to reach the public, especially young audiences, but to also be aware of the impact and limitations of social networks. “We have gone from a time when social media was the reality to a time when social media is a world, but not our only world.”

Oriol Duran was editor of the weekly newspaper La Fura, SER Penedès-Garraf and Canal Blau de Vilanova before moving on to corporate communication. In this field, this man from the Penedès region was head of communication for the Esquerra group in Parliment and in the Senate, and he was also responsible for communication of the Republican group in the City of Barcelona, where was coordinator for health communications in the Barcelona area during the pandemic.

The rector, Alfonso Méndiz, closed the meeting by thanking the speaker and attendees and remembering that this is a very special year because UIC Barcelona is celebrating its 25th anniversary. “We want you Alumni to be our ambassadors and to be proud of your university, as proud as we are of our Alumni,” he concluded.