Antonio Franco died on Saturday 25 September. He had been fighting cancer since 2011. A great journalist, he was president of AmicsUAB from 2010 to 2014. In 2014 he decided to retire from the post due to medical problems.

Franco was born in 1947 into a Lleida family based in Barcelona. He graduated in Journalism at the Escola de la Església in Barcelona. He later taught journalistic writing at the same institution and went on to teach newspaper technology and design at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the UAB.

He began working in 1969 as a sports reporter at Diario de Barcelona, and then moved through the areas of design, political information and editorial coordination. In 1976 he was appointed deputy editor of the newspaper.

He had a brief stint at Televisión Española, directing the weekly summary programme Siete Días, and in 1978 he was entrusted with organising the founding team and the future model of El Periódico de Cataluña - of which he was the first director - which in just three years became one of the four most widely read newspapers in Spain. In 1982 he joined the Madrid daily El País as deputy editor to prepare the start-up and manage the Barcelona edition. In 1988 he returned to El Periódico de Catalunya as director. In May 2006 he left to take up the post of advisor to the Presidency of Grupo Zeta.

A member of the Democratic Group of Journalists during the Franco regime, Antonio Franco was an elected member of the IPI (International Press Institute), an organisation dedicated to the active defence of freedom of expression and communication throughout the world. In the same vein, he was one of the drafters of the Code of Ethics of the College of Journalists of Catalonia, and later promoted the internal Editorial Statute of the newspaper El Periódico, which establishes the ethical obligations of journalists in the medium. He has received the Godó, Ortega y Gasset, Luca de Tena journalism and Antonio Asensio journalism awards.

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