Under the right of reply, APIGRAF presents this exhibition, relating to the news “In defense of the press, alert to democracy”, published in this newspaper on December 12, 2025, which states the following: “The growing degradation of the printing industry and the progressive suffocation of distribution chains are two factors that place Portugal at serious risk of, very soon, being left without access to the written press in vast areas of its territory. For many of our publications, the main way of ensuring regular contact with the public is, today, printing in Spanish companies. This with all the inherent difficulties and constraints, in addition to the damage to the national economy.”
APIGRAF represents in Portugal, among others, companies that print newspapers and magazines.
The text in question, which deserves the credibility inherent to publication in an “opinion” column, begins by referring to the “growing degradation of the printing industry”, pairing it with the topic of distribution to externally state reasons for a crisis in the press that we agree exists and to which the printing industry contributed nothing.
In fact, printing companies are industrial units that are necessarily professionally managed. There is no “degradation” in this sector of the printing industry. The article under analysis refers to a conscious and strategic option by these printing company customers for occasional production outside the national territory. Not because national companies do not respond, on the contrary: if the printed edition reaches newsstands on time, it is due to the efforts of the national printing industry. And many newspapers are well aware of how much the printing companies they work with have always supported them, even in the most critical moments. What there may be is the option of these customers not to order production from them; By maintaining this strategy long enough, and knowing the technical and economic demands of the newspaper production equipment that we have all lived with over the years, the option of printing abroad will obviously result in the suffocation of the companies that print the newspapers. These companies are victims, not agents of the situation mentioned. And it is also true that the use of Spanish companies, as they say, causes “damage to the national economy”: but this is a result of the choice of the signatories of the opinion article, it has nothing to do with national printing companies.
APIGRAF is naturally available to analyze the topic with the signatories and collaborate, in whatever way it can, to resolve a problem that affects and concerns everyone, and whose social repercussions justify, in fact, an “alert to democracy”. But he cannot help but protest against the content of two apparently thoughtless mentions of the industries he represents which, made by those who have the obligation to master the subtleties of writing, prove to be particularly incorrect, ungrateful and offensive.
The president of APIGRAF, José Manuel Lopes de Castro