Journalism and Bohemia

Abstract

In the last decades of the 19th century and the early ones of the 20th it happened in Madrid, imitating Paris, a crosswise movement that attracted the attention of the Spanish society. It was the one named Bohemia, which left a flippant image of messy life, an outlandish and nonconforming aesthetic and a headon rejection to conventional principles or customs. They were a numerous groups of rebel and disobedient young authors who swarm around cafés and news rooms. In the latter, they were there just because in the press was, even uncertain, their only income. They were the first contributors, the first freelance. Given that the bohemian hole up in newspapers, what did they contribute to journalism? Did they contribute to settle the basis of an incipient profession? Do they provide something more than improvisation or inventiveness?