[ad_1]
Vicente Jorge Silva, co-founder and first director of the newspaper Público, died at dawn on Tuesday. He was 74 years old. The news was advanced by Public and confirmed to the Observer by a familiar source.
Vicente Jorge Silva: “I felt the death of Belmiro de Azevedo as if it were a friend”
Born on November 8, 1945 in Funchal, Madeira, into a family of photographers, the journalist was also responsible for the creation of the magazine, the weekly Expresso, and directed the Funchal Trade.
“I think I learned to be a journalist in Comércio do Funchal“He said in an interview with the Observer, in September 2019.” I even did a literary page when I was 14 or 15 years old, I don’t know how it is possible, in a weekly in Madeira. And therefore journalism was something that was deeply ingrained in me. Although I have no precedent in my family. They are all photographers. But He was crazy about journalism and then cinema too.. “
After a “conflict” with the “comrades” of Comércio do Funchal, he went to Lisbon in 1974, where he joined the Expresso team.
“At one point, Balsemão tells me:“ Listen, come here for a while and that’s it. Then you receive the piece, I don’t know what, then you see it soon ”. Well, I did. And, after a while, I adapted quite well to the newspaper environment. And one of those responsible for the newspaper went to Balsemão and told him that my understanding with the rest of the staff was so good that I had to go there, because naturally it was family. Balsemão told me that and I went in ”.
In the 1980s, he became the director of the weekly, when the idea of creating “a magazine on newspaper” arose, which was born at the moment when Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa became the director of the newspaper: “(…) He had an excellent relationship with Marcelo, but he felt much more comfortable doing the first notebook without me being there, because there were those drafting meetings and sometimes I would ask myself some questions: “So this is being treated in a certain way, wouldn’t it be better to treat it in another way, listening to more people?” Anyway, things like that. I think that division was great for both parties (…) “
Still in the weekly, he began to screen Público, becoming its first director, in 1990. He even tried to “convince” Francisco Pinto Balsemão to create the newspaper, but without success. Then he knocks on the door of Belmiro de Azevedo and describes him as “the dustiest person” among Portuguese businessmen.
“Belmiro de Azevedo was not an expert in the newspaper business, and neither was I.. We had a project for a newspaper that we liked to do and then we saw who in Portugal could finance that project. Of course, it would be much more practical to be Pinto Balsemão, if he were there. But it was not like that. I thought that the Express was always the same and I wanted to do something that came out every day and followed the news in a much more lively way ”.
Asked by The Observer about his most striking controversy, Vicente Jorge Silva dismisses the “scratch generation”, an expression he used in a 1994 editorial, which he signed in the student demonstrations against Manuel Ferreira Leite, Minister of Education of Cavaco Silva.
After leaving Public in 1996, Vicente Jorge Silva was a deputy and member of the PS. To the Observer, he assured that he would never have joined the party “if he had known what I know today” and does not believe in the theory that António Costa or Augusto Santos Silva did not know who José Sócrates really was.
His big dream was to be a film director. This dream came true, having made a feature film and several short films.
