In 2023, the Agencia EFE renewed its style manual after 13 years, with a new work titled “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente,” coordinated by journalist Javier Lascuráin.
Style manuals have long been used in the media to give them a distinct voice, a particular way of telling stories, and a defined personality.
These manuals typically address professional issues (such as the length of news items, editing, and presentation methods), ethical issues (attribution of information to sources, limits of information), and linguistic matters (spelling and grammar rules, preferred forms).
Initially conceived as internal working tools, style manuals have often garnered public interest and have been published as books accessible to all readers.
This was the case with EFE’s “Manual de español urgente” (now transformed into the “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente”), which was pioneering in adopting such guidelines. EFE published its first style norms in 1975 when hundreds of journalists were already contributing to its lines from five continents, using not only the Spanish of Spain but also that of Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, and many other countries.
These initial guidelines were just a few dozen typewritten pages. Still, with the help of academic Fernando Lázaro Carreter, they soon evolved into a work that quickly became a reference for professionals and journalism students and has since been reissued dozens of times.
Over the years, few major Spanish-language media outlets have yet to publish their style books.
The “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente” encompasses the ethical, professional, and linguistic standards that govern EFE ‘s journalistic work.
Beyond its internal utility, this work offers these guidelines to all professionals in other media, educators, and communication students who share EFE ’s fundamental principles: rigor, clarity, and precision in information; contextualization, verification, honesty, and, of course, the utmost respect for the subjects of the news and the citizens to whom it is directed.
In its well-known public service vocation, EFE has made the digital version of this book freely available to everyone, downloadable from its corporate website (www.agenciaefe.es) since the beginning of 2024.
Its official presentation kicked off the commemorative events for EFE ‘s 85th anniversary, marking 85 years of history on January 3.
To celebrate this anniversary, on January 30, at the end of that month, EFE deposited its identity codes, basic standards, and linguistic and ethical criteria followed by its professionals to report world events into the Caja de las Letras at the Cervantes Institute.
Since the end of January 2024, the vault of the Cervantes Institute, which holds secrets and symbols of Hispanic culture writers and artists, also treasures the style manuals of the main Spanish news agency and some of the most recognizable photographs in Spanish history, such as those taken by EFE during the 23F coup attempt in 1981.
Much of this legacy was deposited by the agency’s president, Miguel Ángel Oliver, under the watchful eye of Cervantes director Luis García Montero, who considered EFE’s work “increasingly necessary as the air we breathe” for its “honesty,” “reliability,” and “rigor.”
Particularly at this time because, as he said, “In times of floods, the first thing that becomes scarce is potable water, and in times of information overabundance, like the one we are living in, the first thing that becomes scarce is truthful information.”
On that day, according to García Montero, the Caja de las Letras opened to “a journalistic benchmark” that has, in his opinion, been able to detect “the dangers of post-truth” and the emergence of artificial intelligence in “an information overabundance that threatens our democratic systems.”
Oliver also emphasized the need for credibility in the media, proud that this kind of ‘time capsule’ has been opened to store the “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente.”
The manual, co-published with Cervantes, was coordinated by EFE journalist Javier Lascuráin, who explained that the book is very new, as its name suggests, but also ancient because it inherits a long tradition of style texts from the agency, which was a pioneer in such works.
He said it was a “living and useful” legacy for society, in whose pages the “Libro de estilo urgent” of 2011 is rewritten. This was coordinated by former EFE Information and International director Emilio Crespo, who also deposited a flash drive with the website “EFE hace historia,” which digitally compiles the agency’s history.
The Caja de las Letras, this kind of “sacred vault,” allowed Oliver, a great lover of archaeology, to fantasize about the “treasure of words and images” that EFE handed over for posterity.
“It’s the human treasure of language, which defines humanity. Here we leave our codes,” commented Oliver, who deposited the style manual published in 1978, days after the Constitution was approved.
The “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente” (New Urgent Style Guide) outlines the basic norms for EFE ‘s informational activities, covering ethical, professional, and linguistic aspects.
In 2011, EFE published its “Libro de estilo urgente,” a journalistic manual written and coordinated by EFE journalist Emilio Crespo. For the first time, this manual introduced a multimedia approach to the Agency’s work and outlined the basic principles of a Statute of Newsroom that its professionals had broadly approved in 2006.
Now, twelve years after that publication, this “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente” is, as expected in such a changing world, more than just a mere revision of its predecessor. Based on that work, retaining its main original contents, the new book adopts a different structure, revises and rewrites much of its material, and incorporates numerous aspects that have emerged or gained importance in recent years in EFE ‘s newsrooms and all media from social media to artificial intelligence, inclusive language, and sponsored content.
The book has three main parts (ethical and deontological aspects, content production, and language) with two additional annexes.
The first part elaborates on the principles in the Statute of Newsroom, constituting EFE‘s commitments to its clients and the society it serves.
It includes guidelines on handling particularly sensitive issues (suicide, mental health, gender violence, immigration, racism and xenophobia, diversity) and the necessary gender perspective in all our information. It also regulates potential conflicts of interest for its professionals when practicing journalism and outlines basic principles for including sponsored content in information lines. Another section provides basic guidelines on using artificial intelligence and automatically generated content, a matter of significant concern in newsrooms recently.
The second part of the book, the most extensive, addresses the Agency’s professional practices: how we obtain, handle, produce, edit, and publish our content.
It encompasses three chapters dedicated to the three fundamental phases of this process, ensuring the quality of our products and the organization of our services. This chapter lists the general guidelines of this process and how they apply to text, graphics, video, and multimedia content. It also adds some guidelines on SEO positioning and the importance of correctly tagging all our information across all platforms.
How we select information in an over-informed world, how
we handle and relate to sources, and how we approach news coverage, from press conferences to statements and documents, demonstrations, electoral processes, or dangerous situations. The basic lines for citing other media, informing or referring
to the agency itself, and regulating how and under what limits we use material not obtained by our professionals (provided
by companies or institutions or generated by users) are also established.
Following some general notes common to all services and products (multimedia focus, clarity, and conciseness as style marks), guidelines for each medium are broken down: text
(headlines, length, genres, urgent and breaking news, alerts), photo, video (raw, edited, live), audio (podcasts, live), infographics, web pages, social networks, mobile alerts, digital agenda.
This chapter includes instructions on handling data in news, verification as part of the daily work of all our journalists and
in a specific format, and notes on certain types of specialized information (judicial, economic, sports).
Editing is a crucial phase in an agency’s information process; it spans from one of our journalists’ acquisition and production of information to its publication and delivery to clients.
How we select information in an over-informed world, how we handle and relate to sources, and how we approach news coverage, from press conferences to statements and documents, demonstrations, electoral processes, or dangerous situations.
The basic lines for citing other media, informing or referring to the agency itself, and regulating how and under what limits we use material not obtained by our professionals (provided by companies or institutions or generated by users) are also established.
Following some general notes common to all services and products (multimedia focus, clarity, and conciseness as style marks), guidelines for each medium are broken down: text (headlines, length, genres, urgent and breaking news, alerts), photo, video (raw, edited, live), audio (podcasts, live), infographics, web pages, social networks, mobile alerts, digital agenda.
This chapter includes instructions on handling data in news, verification as part of the daily work of all our journalists and in a specific format, and notes on certain types of specialized information (judicial, economic, sports).
Editing is a crucial phase in an agency’s information process; it spans from one of our journalists’ acquisition and production of information to its publication and delivery to clients.
The third major section is dedicated to language, the proper use of Spanish, one of EFE‘s historical and current commitments.
While many media-style books include extensive dictionaries of terms or expressions, EFE already has an unrivaled tool for that task: the Fundación del Español Urgente (FundéuRAE), whose website resolves almost all doubts that may arise in newsrooms daily, which this book refers.
However, this chapter compiles some of the most frequent doubts or errors detected in editing desks (grammar, lexicon, and orthography) to facilitate consultation, with links to the corresponding Fundéu recommendations. It also includes some classic guidelines on writing names, titles, treatments, acronyms, numbers, measurements, and currencies.
Additionally, specific sections are dedicated to three issues that often generate doubts in newsrooms. The first is language and gender, an almost unavoidable topic in contemporary work. In this area, and to summarize, EFE‘s stance is to respect academic doctrine, which states that in Spanish, the masculine form acts as an unmarked gender and thus refers to both men and women in many contexts (citizens, students). However, the fact that the masculine can act this way only obligates us to sometimes use it. Therefore, the book offers strategies and proposals (all perfectly valid and by Spanish norms) to avoid its overuse and contribute to greater visibility of the feminine.
The second topic is the presence of foreign words in our information. We list (incompletely but valuable as a first approach) about a hundred of the most common ones and the alternatives or adaptations proposed by FundéuRAE for each.
Finally, the book aims to unify the writing of place names, a challenging issue for an agency that reports from and to clients worldwide. It offers guidelines for transcribing names from languages using other alphabets (Chinese, Arabic, Russian) and using those that employ the Latin alphabet but with different characters and diacritics from Spanish (Portuguese, German, French, Catalan).
Lastly, it establishes criteria for the place names of Spanish autonomous communities with a co-official language besides Spanish.
The book is completed with two appendices: The first appendix includes guidelines on the legal implications of journalistic activity, which were already featured in the 2011 book.
Among other contributions, it contains a very interesting scale that assesses the greater or lesser risk a journalist and their media outlet may incur when publishing certain information based on the type of protagonist, the nature of the accusations, and the sources relied upon.
The second appendix establishes the need to continually review and update this work, ensuring it always adapts to the agency’s working dynamics and the needs of its clients without losing the essence of its principles as a public company.
The publication of this “Nuevo libro del estilo urgente” coincides with the launch of an internal norm and style site, accessible only to EFE professionals, which serves as its main hub.
In addition to the general principles outlined in this new book, EFE, the world’s leading Spanish-language news agency in 180 cities across 110 countries and numerous departments producing various products in dozens of locations on five continents, requires more detailed guidelines. These guidelines sometimes apply to a single product (such as guides on using the agenda, creating multimedia packages, and producing captioned videos). The norm and style site compiles and organizes these documents, making them easily accessible to any EFE professional who needs them and allowing for continuous updates.
