Truth is often said to be the first victim of wars and crises. The Olive Press subscription scheme helps cut through fake news as Spain fights COVID-19

TRUTH is often said to be the first victim of wars and crises.

And, right now, it pays to be wary of any information that gets slapped on social media or rapidly Google-translated for a website.

For fake news is rife during the COVID-19 crisis, as we have discovered ourselves over the last fortnight.

Disgracefully, conspiracy theorists, keyboard warriors, people with agendas and those seeking monetary gain have been getting far too much air-time and traction.

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• COVID-19 GUIDE: What self-employed expats in Spain’s different regions need to know about being autonomo during coronavirus crisis

Having good journalists to look behind the headlines, dig into sources and analyse the claims is key to having a trustworthy newspaper or website.

And as any good journalist will tell you… the best stories always carry three or four good facts.

So here we have a few:

• FACT1: According to leading online comparison site www.similarweb.com the Olive Press had DOUBLE the number of visitors than any other English rival in March
• FACT 2: According to Alexa.com, owned by Amazon, we are this week ranked in the world’s Top 6,000 sites (see graphic), putting us around 70,000 places ahead of our nearest rival 
• FACT 3: According to official Google Analytics, we had 4.3 million visitors in March reading 6.7 million pages
• FACT 4: Global digital advertising revenue has dropped by around 80% over the last month

And it is due to this last fact that we have introduced a subscription scheme for our regular online visitors INSTEAD of introducing a pay wall, as many other publishers have over the last few years.

Meaning 100% of our content is available all of the time, it also allows us to continue investing in our editorial team, which currently counts nearly 20 journalists and writers.

So please if you are a regular user of our website make a small contribution, which can be from as little as €5. 

You’ll see the green button easy to find on the site. 

Every little helps, as they say.

• EXTRA FACT: In case you hadn’t noticed, we have continued to print all FIVE of our editions through this crisis, of course cutting down in size and numbers to mirror the number of distribution points currently closed.