The subsidy granted by the Basque Government ARGIA.eus to the project will be the lowest in recent years, halving in four years, as shown in the main graph.

The Basque Government’s resolution is even more painful when compared with the subsidies it has given to other Basque media in the Basque Country. Of the grants in Basque ARGIA.eus will contribute EUR 17,444 and EUR 176,600 to Vocento.

Below are some of the subsidies granted by the Basque Government on the Internet from the start of the Basque Country.

The websites receive more money from grants in Euskera than the means that we do them entirely in Euskera, although some news is made daily in Euskera, among other things, two that are mainly in Spanish. Only quantitatively there are no differences in the news, not even qualitatively, the news in Basque of the media fundamentally in Spanish are far from being “relevant” topics. Is this the Basque policy of the Txantxangorri?

For example, El Diario Vasco and El Correo received EUR 86,600 and EUR 87,000 respectively. In December, the Diario Vasco published an average of three news stories a day in Basque, in the “Zabalik” section; El Correo in the “With You” section, in the “With You” section.

On what criteria is this policy of distributing public money justified? How do you understand that you don't feel the harp?

To this must be added the publicity that is put in the media by public institutions. In 2013, the government that presides over Iñigo Urkullu spent EUR 5,649,112 on advertising and 98% of that money on the Spanish-language media and 2% on Euskera, according to the latest data from the Basque Government at the request of the Hekimen Elkartea association. Advertising is also a very effective language policy.

We will continue with the net wager thanks to the community

In ARGIA, unlike some media that receive more money than us, we generate all the contents in Basque, all through free consultation on the network. Our content has no click-through or padded limits and we expand the material we generate every day with a Creative Commons license, provided the source is cited so anyone can use it. Our work is literally from the Basque community.

We believe in the Internet, in the possibilities it gives us as journalists, and also in what we can do as Basques. The people who want to live in Euskera deserve a dignified website on the Internet, and at ARGIA we want to keep working hard on it. Not only is it fair, but it is reasonable to demand a political commitment of equal rank to those who manage everyone’s money.

If we analyze the interest of the contents, and taking into account the research based on the UMAP tool on the contents that Basques share in the network, we can proudly state that ARGIA is the second most shared and the one with the most tweets by URL, with the highest “interest rate”.

The criteria for allocating subsidies granted by the Basque Government on the Internet do not include such variables. We prioritize following the logic of citizenship consumption to expand information, in these consumption habits social networks have a great weight and in social networks we prefer to reinforce the referentiality of GIA instead of constantly sending clicks to URL0. This means that the Government tells us less than what is our reach. We will, however, continue along this road, because our objectives are efficiency and to achieve the best of reality, rather than adapting ourselves to the Government’s mediators.

2016 data on the Internet

The reduction of the subsidy to Argia and the three-year freeze do not meet the criteria that the Basque Government has set in motion when granting the subsidies. According to Google Analytics, the number of visits and pages served increased by 30% in two years to 1,423,976 and pages served increased by 20.22% in 2016 with 2,802,015 pages served.

To this must be added traffic on social networks: Aside from Twitter, Youtube and personal accounts, the Facebook average in 2016 has been 18,257 people a day. 47.7% more than the previous year (12,362). If these data are impressive for a medium as small as ours, the results we have obtained in a few specific days are even more satisfactory.

On 10 January 2016, a daily follow-up to the Basque political prisoners’ human rights demonstration, in particular photos and videos, reached 161,000 people on Facebook. If we give so much importance to reach, we don't understand how this data isn't valued.

2016 has been the year in which ARGIA has reached most people in its history, both through the magazine and through the web and social networks.

Unrecognised role of the media

Like the other Basque media, we are also at: Responding to a need of the community of speakers, giving prestige to the language, guaranteeing the right to receive information in Basque, creating and promoting culture, renewing the language...

In the network, we also developed three other main functions, in addition to those mentioned. On the one hand, to collect and make available to everyone the treasure that we are constantly creating: for example, that we are building the largest multimedia repository of Euskal Herria argia.eus, where almost 2,000 works are saved. Secondly, to feed the community in Euskera: an example of this is the content we create by argia.eus journalists and members of an active and interesting blogging community. And thirdly, the international dissemination without media news from Euskal Herria: an example of this is that the Argia English channel that we renew every two weeks or a report about the Korrika and the Basque Country has been translated and disseminated to 40 languages in a gigantic Auzolan...

The Basque Government is hindering the development of the ARGIA website with only EUR 17,444 per year and at the same time influences competitiveness if other media that are not in Basque have to provide subsidies and advertising balances in Basque in the next three years.

We do not consider this resolution of subsidies to be fair. The Basque media association Hekimen complained from the outset that the Basque Government has modified the criteria for the award of aid without reaching an agreement with the sector. Hekimen explained that the distribution of aid for the coming years "closes the door" to the creation of new projects in the Basque media sector. We do not want artificial competition between local and national media from the institutions. In order to influence linguistic normalisation, it is clear that local and national media are needed, and the money market allocated from public institutions needs to be increased. There is no doubt that the media in Basque must receive more.

First of all, we wanted to denounce this unjust resolution and communicate it to the community. In order to keep inciting since childhood, the team would like to give special thanks to those who support this project. We are keeping the project together, and if subsidies are cut, the balances necessary to make the project viable affect us all. All of us who maintain ARGIA as a project have received the cut.

We strengthen what strengthens us

So if you appreciate LIGHT and haven't taken the step yet, it's a good time to do ARGIA. We practice the idea of solidarity: put on what you can and pick up what you think is right. The more partners we have, the more capacity we have as a community. For the maintenance and development of these tools. The more we are, the more force we will have to continue to act from a young age.