About me

Francisco Fernández Beltrán holds a PhD in Business and Institutional Communications from the Universitat Jaume I and graduated in Information Sciences (major in Journalism) from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. He has worked as a journalist on the newspapers Mediterráneo and Levante, where he specialized in economy and education. A founder of the advertising agency Direcom, some of the accounts he managed were Castellón Tourism Business Federation, Official College of Doctors in Castellón and Official College of Pharmacists.

Since 1998, he has headed the Publication and Communication Service at the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón. He also teaches on the official master in New Tendencies and Innovation Processes in Communication, for which he is codirector, and on other postgraduate courses. He has participated as a guest lecturer on masters at the Universitat de València, Universitat de Barcelona, Universidad Cardenal Herrera-CEU, Universidad Católica de Murcia, Universidad de Las Américas de Ecuador and Universidad del Valle de México. He was part of the team that produced the Image and Communication Management Manual for the Universidad Jaume I, the first to be published in a Spanish public university. He taught on the Advertising and Public Relations Degree from the course 2000-01 to the course 2003-04. Since 2001, he has been co-director of the Local Communication Congress “ComLoc“, an annual event that has analyzed the bases of local communication. He has published, as coeditor, the following titles: La prensa local y la prensa gratuita; Radio y televisión en el ámbito local; La publicidad local; La comunicación local por Internet; La comunicación corporativa en el ámbito local; Nuevas tendencias en la prensa local; La televisión digital ante el fin de la era analógica and La publicidad de las instituciones locales. He has also published articles on aspects of communication, particularly from the corporate and local communication perspectives. He collaborates with the International Centre for Higher Education in Communication for Latin America, based in Quito (Ecuador).

He is member of the research groups Management of Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (GERSE); Monitoring in New Trends and Innovation Processes in Communication and  Journalism, Communication and Power. His areas of specialty are corporate communications, reputation, new technologies for communication, media relations, communication of social responsibility, local communication and science journalism.

He has worked as an institutional evaluator in quality process overseen by the National Agency for Quality and Accreditation Evaluation (ANECA) and for the Andalucía Regional Government.

Since November 2008, he has been president of the Spanish University Press Union (UNE), an association of 64 press services at public and private universities in Spain, for which he also held various positions of responsibility since 2003. From November 2005 to June 2010, he has been executive secretary of the Communication Office Network of the Spanish Universities Rectors Conference (CRUE). He is also a member of the communication committee of the Valencian Universities Network for the Promotion of Research, Development and Innovation (RUVID).

He is vice-president of the association for the communication development AD Comunica and member of the association of communication heads Dircom. He was co-founder and member of the management committees of the Castellón Marketing Club and the Professional Association of Journalists of Castellon.

He is the author of the first manual in Spanish for new parents, Padre novato, and contributed to the publication of two collective books of noir tales: Crímenes de Castellón (2008) and Más crímenes de Castellón (2009).

(Last updated: July 2010)