The format is modified in 55. Durango Fair and there will be no counters. It is October 8 and you can consult the decision of Gerediaga Elkartea on our website. Greeting, knowing, talking, thanking and ultimately dismissing all the people of the community who come year after year faithful to the window of ARGIA, this 2020, among many other things, will leave us without the energy that the enfrentamiento.Es is a pity, the truth.

The news from Durango, however, has another more pragmatic aspect that has worried people moving in the Basque culture. Durango Square is for many projects the most important point of sale of the year, and although Gerediaga Elkartea announces that he will channel the purchases through a website, uncertainty is the one that prevails among the agents, since nobody knows how the citizen who goes to the fair will respond, as this is the first time this approach is made. It seems difficult to maintain the trends of previous years and better prepare for the war economy.

In view of the panorama, the ARGIA team is not standing idly by, and they have decided to set up a specific working group to maintain the end of the year. Although it is known that the economic support that was achieved in Durango in previous years will not be possible in other ways, passion for the struggle is imposed.

Importance of points of sale

The main work of this working group is to explain that buying products for Christmas gifts from ARGIA has a lot of militant activity. Books, calendars, agendas, suits, bags, etc. further information on the products in the table on the page. Jakoba’s book Errekondo Etxerako Landare is succeeding greatly, as it has sold 2,500 copies a month, and is now ready for the second edition.

On the other hand, the citizens will find all our products on the special website of the Durango Fair; and at the same time, we have renewed the online store or the ARGIA Azoka, in addition to making the web more orderly, simplifying the organization and improving navigation on the mobiles. The team has been prepared to channel sales via the Instagram platform, which has recently been very successful.

Finally, on the physical points of sale, ARGIA reaffirms its political commitment to small trade. Faced with the offensive of the multinationals that have placed the red carpet in front of the traders’ landscape, essential to the lives and sovereignty of the peoples, ARGIA will launch the Herrian erosi campaign, at least until the end of Christmas. The objective is to openly assert the need to defend and maintain among all the points of sale of the neighborhoods and towns.

This claim is closely linked to a road that we have been working on in recent years: ARGIA's own distribution network. Although this informative link is rarely mentioned, it is a topic directly related to the sovereignty of information, as it is part of the process of generating information until reaching citizenship. The employee who joins ARGIA will receive from the hands of the veterans of the house the idea of taking control of the process chain. From this perspective, we understand the service we have put in place with the communication company Antza printing press, Adur software and Iametza, which have been organized around the journal in previous decades, or more recently, to distribute the journals through the bicycle and respecting the dignity of the workers.

Today our products can be found in hundreds of kioskos, bookstores, stationery, toy shops, organic shops, farmers' cooperatives, feed stores, flower shops or grass shops of Euskal Herria. For two years now, in this relationship initiated with the thread of a report by Mikel García, we are also collaborating with the merchants in Bilbao who deserve the right to live and the roles in Euskal Herria.

We came to ask for help in identifying the ARGIA product sales stores. If you think our materials are in the shop you like in your neighborhood or village and tell us the merchant or us – 679 81 73 54 or okorta@argia.eus – contact him, we agree the accounts and we will ship the material at full speed.

We cannot allow Amazon to be the main winner of the COVID-19 epidemic at the expense of the local economy and workers' rights. The faithful readers of Pello Zubiria had already read it in the report on the trajectory of this company in 2013, which had the following title: Amazon's young journalist found the orwell scents. Last week we reported that Bizi militants! have denounced in Baiona that this multinational is driving precariousness, the transport of products from one side of the world through polluting transport and the destruction of small local businesses, as well as excessive consumption. We want to make it clear: The LIGHT isn't on Amazon, or it's decided not to be. To our surprise, we have contacted the people who offer ARGIA products to withdraw them, and we see that action needs to be taken from institutions and from society, unless we want to pass over thousands of shops like a hurricane. Moreover, in the new announcement that it will organise a distribution centre in the Basque Country, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa.

Conference cycle

Seeing that we spend many hours at home and that we are able to make elegant audiovisual products over the Internet, ARGIA has organised a cycle of conferences with the aim of promoting reflections according to its own agenda. Because from the Basque Country it is possible to build a community with other values, other perspectives and other attitudes, as pointed out a few months ago by Beñat de Donostia, recently affiliated with ARGIA. “It’s more, because it’s the only way for this people to live in Basque in the future,” he concluded.

Three tertulias per week will be held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Very diverse themes: biodiversity loss, Inor Ez Da Ilegala project, transformative social economy, new housing models, information sovereignty, plant care, agroecology... You have the whole program in this link.

And preparing a conference cycle has made ARGIA have a television set at its headquarters. From one day to the next, get a painting garnet, paint a wall of the room that was used to make great meetings, buy a nice secondhand chair, organize lighting and decor, as well as a studio to record talks and interviews. Since, after 100 weeks, the Beranegi website has not been broadcast, there has been no television dish at the headquarters of Lasarte-Oria, and for the future the objective will be to take the pulse, under the direction of Eneritz Arzallus.

Do you drink from any source?

The review at the end of the year inevitably leads us to talk about subscription. Whoever drives any project knows how hard it is to get people willing to put money. ARGIA has experienced great ups and downs in its 101 years of history, which gives even more value to the results obtained in recent years. How many of us are? We are coming to the end of the process, a elaboration that aims to know the number of people we form a community. Below are some subscription or community holders, thinking that they serve to explain trends.

• Since 2013, the ARGIA community has grown steadily for seven years, accounting for almost 35% of the total.
• As for the number of new members, in 2019 we made the best brand ever. This year the number of new additions has already been exceeded, and it is one month before the end of the year.
• Just as the number of people joining the project is increasing year by year, many people are suspending their subscription, but the number of casualties is being the lowest in the last 10 years in 2020.
• At the time when it was proposed to remove the price of the ARGIA subscription and change the model, although in the working group several fears were put on the table – "and if everyone wants to receive the magazine for free? "–the results have given the decision the right answer.
• From the moment each decides how much money they give to them, members put in favor of the project an average amount higher than the subscription price.
• More and more collectives and people are receiving free, and the community is being able to guarantee the right to information of its members.
• In addition to putting what one wants and can, the possibility to request the return of what each one wants to customize, has brought many ways to be “paid” from ARGIA, all interesting and adapted to their tastes.
• In the last 10 years there has been a great movement in the community that supports ARGIA economically, and although it deserves further investigation, we can say that the data show great signs of a powerful generational change. Also, for many years the faithful ARGIA subscribers have been following us.

Despite the best results in the history of ARGIA, we live with concern the economic and social crisis that we have, and lately it is up to us to collect raw evidence of it firsthand, with messages of suspension of shops or restaurants that have had to lower the shutter. “I couldn’t share the magazine with clients anymore, and now that I’ve had to close the business, I write to unsubscribe,” says a colleague last week. In these messages economic reasons prevail, so we are once again repeating that no one has to run out of ARGIA if the reason is economic. And having said that, we have been touched for the second time by the members of the community who are moving in solidarity with those who are most vulnerable.

The messages of the members who allow us to make the reason for ARGIA public can be read on Twitter in the @Argia J account. Whether it's to boost Euskera or independent journalism, which are the two main reasons, or for the reason you want to say that the most strategic way to drive this project is to partner with ARGIA. And if you're still looking for a good reason, let's see what this Jean-Dominique of Baiona looks like: “I don’t drink from any source.”

How long...!

...you can make an exhaustive magazine with every journalist put in your house? Three months? Six? A year? We do not know, but the confinement has made us see that ARGIA feeds on the relationships of all kinds, especially in our environment, of the themes, concerns and points of view extracted from the informal conversations that arose in the workplace, are the starting points of the reports, interviews, analysis or news that will be published later on.

In March, all the workers went home and stopped publishing the magazine on paper to put the health of our printing and mail workers above all else. Teleworking was not a new practice in our environment, as ARGIA workers have had the opportunity to work from home, as we are a group of workers who live throughout the Basque Country.

As the web and social networks was a strategic decision taken a few years ago by all ARGIA journalists, we left the weekly and turned ARGIA into a digital medium, and thanks to each journalist choosing their working hours to combine it with home care, we updated the information from Monday to Sunday between 06:00 and 22:00 for the first time. Result: Tripling the usual visits on the web, destroying the records of visitors we had visited until then.

Over time, however, the protective measures and knowledge established against the disease have been changing. ARGIA calls for the political opportunity to make lives more livable without confinement. Although this autumn most workers do so mainly from home, we have decided to recognise the value of partnership and to practise a mixed working model. The decision has been to look for ways to be at the table where health measures have been tightly established – open windows, food and meetings at the table that goes out into the street – about two or three times a week, and all together at least once a week through fixed meetings. The intensity of the interaction has been revived in this way, and we hope it has been noticed in recent journals. We would be happy if it were to be seen from the outside that the paper has a great deal of debate on the issues that are being published, that it maintains serious criteria for doing journalism, and above all that it will soon reach 102.

Rounding the year

“The last month is a time of risk for going up or down and we still don’t know how the year will end,” says Bego Zuza of ARGIA. We're not going to do the sale we made last year in Durango. However, even though we lower our forecasts, if we work well, I believe we are in a position to double and save the year.”

However, the torch is clear that companies like ours are unique species: used to survival. Non-profit, the priority is to ensure year-on-year survival. “Last year was the centenary, we did a good year and this year we expected workers to pay two extra fees at the beginning of the year, but when the pandemic came, we already eliminated these two fees directly – nobody would think we would charge them – and that decision has a direct effect with the good economic end of the year. That is also what the working men and women support the project, as we also say for transparency.”

See four other key factors to explain the economic outcome: “The increase in subscriptions, the guarantee of subsidies fixed for three years; the fall in institutional advertising and the task of compensating diversification lines – Bizi Baratzea, Inor Ez Da Ilegala, Lurra Herriari Deia….” It’s been a very powerful year.”

With a view to the future, besides the successful sale of products from the Fair, he considers it strategic to continue working the subscriptions and expanding the community. In his opinion, what must be clear is that the larger the community, the more means to improve the current journalism, to increase the human team, to access the spaces where the work team does not currently arrive, to better respond to those tasks that the hours of the day do not physically give. “All the money that comes out will be invested in making journalism better, to see if we are able to further deepen our independence.”

“The pandemic has brought great changes both in our lives and in ARGIA, but with the reorganization and readaptation that we workers have been doing in recent years in the project, it has caught us ready to face the challenge ahead,” says journalist Estitxu Eizagirre. “At the end of the day, is this pandemic not the hardest test that is passed on to each other’s bases? He has taken us prepared. Now end the year well.”