The Spanish royal household has just renewed its contract for the supply of newspapers and magazines. The figure is not modest: the original January 2024 contract was worth 121,160 euros, and the extension adds around another 5,000. All so that one family can read in the morning what the world is writing about it.

The details are where the story actually is. In Madrid alone, 18,980 copies of national newspapers, 5,110 foreign newspapers and 3,358 weekly and monthly magazines are delivered every year. Add to that 84 subscription newspapers and 54 digital subscriptions. When the royal family spends the summer at Marivent in Palma de Mallorca, another 2,652 national dailies, 588 foreign papers and 360 magazines travel there too.

There is also a schedule that does not get broken. Every edition must arrive at the Zarzuela Palace before 7:30 in the morning on working days and before 8:00 on weekends and holidays, packed into labelled bags for each department separately. Not after the coffee. Before the coffee.

Queen Letizia was a journalist before she entered the palace, and she has clearly not cut that cord. Last year, visiting the famous book stalls at the Cuesta de Moyano in Madrid, she said: "There are many millions of us Spaniards who cannot live without the radio. I do not wake up to alarms or screaming. I open my eyes to the voices of very kind people telling me how life is going."

A lovely sentence. But behind it sits an infrastructure very few people have. When an institution spends a six-figure sum a year purely to know what is written about it, that is not a reading habit - it is monitoring. The difference between a citizen who reads a newspaper and a court that orders 3,358 magazines is the difference between staying informed and tracking your own image.

And here is the most interesting part: 54 digital subscriptions against nearly 19,000 printed copies. In 2026, an institution that can afford anything still asks for paper. Perhaps because on paper you can see how much space they gave you, which page they put you on, and what you failed to read. The algorithm does not show it that way.

Does anyone here count how many newspapers go into which offices - and who pays for that subscription?