Before a journalist, I was a blogger. A university professor, Lucía Martínez Odriozola, encouraged me to create a blog when I finished my career, in 2006, to seek work in the media. At first that was my main motivation, to present an elegant curriculum complement. But when I started working in a newspaper, the blog became a free space to write opinion articles and became a natural glow. I met many fellow travellers on the blogs: on the one hand, Basque journalists with the blog Momo Dice… from Lucía; on the other hand, a lot of Basque cyberfeminists. When we created Pikara Magazine in 2010, the feminist bloggers we discovered along the way were our first collaborators.

I remember with a lot of melancholy that golden age of the blogosphere. The discussion through the comments was friendly, enriching, serene, profound, without character limits. Until 2011, I enjoyed blogger activity without machitro-shore attacks, until I shared a post on micromachismos.

I've been a great cyber-optimist for many years, among other things because Pikara Magazine's trajectory is due to the possibilities that the Internet has given us. As a digital medium, our readers were not only readers: through the comments they could enrich the articles, share them on social networks and thus strengthen their community status. Thanks to the dynamics of the Facebook and Twitter viralization, we managed to have international repercussions and influence the agenda of the great media of communication n.El crowdfunding allowed us to finance the yearbooks and so we discovered the symbiosis that today the edition can have on paper and online.

But disappointments gradually appeared. We decided to close the comments on the articles because cybermachists monopolized them. Our collaborators have suffered the violence of the machistas organized in the Foroautos and La Bubble forums. On Twitter, we have experienced confrontations, polarization, lynchings and defamation. In recent times we have received the most painful ones from a sectarian sector of feminism. For example, we have been accused of being a “pimp” means of communication for spreading various discourses on prostitution, for having tweeted the enriching, serene and profound colloquium that was last held at the Feminist Conference of Euskal Herria. We have often felt the responsibility of putting our interviewees in the spotlight of sectarian tuiters who do not understand or respect journalistic work. This tendency leads to self-care, harassed by the fear of unfollow campaigns.

On the other hand, given the dependence of digital media on monopolistic multinationals, we must reflect on whether we can present ourselves as alternatives. Facebook has threatened us over and over again to close our page, for not respecting the prohibition of naked bodies, which gives us enormous fear, as half of our readers reach our website through this social network. We work under algorithms. It is difficult not to take into account Google Analytics data to decide what to publish and what not to publish. The temptation to take SEO criteria into account when writing headers is high.

In short, it is difficult for cyberoptimism not to deviate. Thus, we can take advantage of the centenary of Argia to learn about long journalistic trajectories. Big data versus Acting from Txiki.Vamos slowly, because we go very far.