Mission

The Xarxa Audiovisual Local (Local Audio-visual Network, or XAL) is a public company set up by the Barcelona provincial authority for the purpose of promoting and fostering local communication. To this end it runs the Xarxa de Televisions Locals (Local Television Network, or XTVL), the on-line news daily lamalla.cat and the news agency XN.

The XTVL is a structure for consensus, coordination and cooperation among audio-visual media, especially community television channels, for the purpose of reinforcing the local communication value chain in the sphere of news content, programmes and services within the reach of the public, as well as implementing all the technology available to give these contents and services the widest possible coverage. At the same time, it complements this with action in the areas of technical advice, training, promotion, operations and innovation that local resources are unable to achieve if they work alone and in isolation.

For its part, lamalla.cat is a digital daily which sets out to be a rolling news service. In addition to news of a general nature, the defining feature of lamalla.cat is the fact that it pays special attention to local and community news and current affairs, with stories provided by regional correspondents in cooperation with local digital media.

Finally, the XN news agency is a unique organisation which emerged from the XTVL itself, as a result of its ability to cooperate with community television channels. This is why XN provides a decentralised view of the news, helping to structure the Catalan media by taking advantage of the production capabilities which exist in the regions and enabling them to operate in a way which leverages them at the same time as seeking sustainability for them.

Recently the XAL began a process of cooperation with the Consorci de Comunicació Local (Local Communication Consortium, or CCL) and the Agència de Comunicació Local (Local Communication Agency, or ACL), responsible for the COMRàdio schedules, with whom it shares a common set of principles: support for local media and disseminating community news. The goal of this process is to end up becoming a multimedia communication group specialising in the local sphere, able to face the challenges of the future in the audio-visual world with the best possible chances of success.

Among the projects the XAL and the ACL share is the publication of XARXACOM, a quarterly magazine concentrating on the realities of the local audio-visual sector.

In general, the aim is to achieve excellence in the field of local public media, in terms of both producing content and providing services for the local media associated with the the project.