A certain type of journalist develops an unbreakable bond with the organization they cover. They genuinely believed in the location, its audience, its language, and its role in the community, not because they had nowhere else to go. That type of journalist was Oihane Mateos. She worked for the Basque public broadcaster EITB for almost her whole career. When she passed away on August 8, 2026, at the age of 45, the grief that spread thru newsrooms and social media felt more like the loss of a real person than a professional tribute.
Mateos was born in 1981 in the small Gipuzkoa municipality of Ibarra. She began her career in radio by taking an early job at Euskadi Irratia, where she learned the fundamentals of the profession, including patience, listening skills, and language accuracy. Radio has the power to either quickly drive people away or draw them in, and Mateos obviously fell into the latter category. Her transition to television was effortless, and she quickly established herself as a regular on Gaur Egun and Teleberri, two of the Basque Country’s most prominent news programs. It is difficult to balance Spanish and Euskera for various audiences when presenting the news in a region with a dual-language culture. Colleagues repeatedly noted that she handled it with extraordinary warmth and poise.
She also contributed a column to ATARIA, a regional Basque-language newspaper in the Tolosaldea region, from 2017 to 2019. This particular detail reveals something intriguing about her. The majority of TV hosts, particularly those who are as well-known as her, have a tendency to stick to their own lane. Mateos appeared to have a sincere interest in writing—the slower, more deliberate kind. The columns were grounded and intimate, relating to the conversations and rhythms of daily life in her region.
She assumed leadership of EITB’s digital news division, Orain, by 2022. It was a big change for the broadcaster as well as for her. For the better part of the past ten years, public television in Europe has been attempting to figure out how to remain relevant to viewers who no longer sit down at 8 p.m. to watch a scheduled bulletin. Mateos was one of the individuals assigned to provide a practical, not just philosophical, but also operational response to that question for EITB.
Her projects were well-thought-out and tangible. Launched in 2023, Orain Berriak, EITB’s WhatsApp news service, won a Platinum Customer Experience Award for best IT project in public administration in 2024. Then, in June 2025, Orain.eus emerged as a comprehensive digital news platform with mobile alerts, live streaming, and brief vertical videos. It’s the kind of infrastructure that subtly decides whether a public broadcaster makes it thru the next ten years without making a big announcement. Mateos built in accordance with her understanding of that.
When you read the reactions from her coworkers following her passing, you’ll notice how consistent the language is. Words like vital, clear, professional, warm, and generous. These are not the meticulously crafted obituary words that people come up with when they are at a loss for words. They feel well-deserved. “She always had a smile,” a coworker wrote. It’s possible that those tributes blend together in grief—that’s a human tendency—but the sheer volume and consistency of them suggests a person who made an impression that wasn’t based on performance. Another person described her as “fine as a communicator, clear with her words.”
The future of Orain and the digital operation she oversaw remains uncertain. There is infrastructure in place. Now, the question is whether the culture and vision she fostered can continue without her. Public news outlets sometimes covertly lose more than they acknowledge, and they frequently handle the loss of people better than they reveal to the public. Mateos was forty-five. A career tends to define itself at that age rather than coming to an end. That has a melancholy quality that doesn’t need to be emphasized.
