The Critical Communication Sciences Network (Critische Kommunikationswissenschaft Netzwerk in German, or KriKoWi in abbreviated form) consists of diverse students, researchers and teachers in the field of communication. Its activity started in 2017. Since then, different working groups have been created, research events have been organized and publications have been promoted.

The network promotes critical scientific research on media and communication. Especially in the academic field, but with the will to influence further, collaborating with political activism and journalistic practices. But what is the critical science of communication? According to the members of the Network, they work with research tools related to social theory and the analysis of capitalism, to analyze property relations, types of command and inequalities of power in the field of communication sciences and, ultimately, to transform social relations taking into account their historical development.

They organize seminars to present, develop and disseminate research, summer and winter classes and conferences. The main annual conference became provisional in two years between 2019 and 2021, and due to the umpteenth wave of COVID-19, they had to be postponed to 2022. The property, the media, the public was the name that received the KriKoWik conference in Vienna, the fourth of the network. The issue of ownership was once again on the table.

Dozens of conferences and workshops were organized in a three-day programme. They analyzed media ownership, financing, relationships of dependence with the state and large companies, the representation of property in the media, discourses on social networks and in public opinion and the role of the media in the construction of a different world.

Three ARGIA journalists landed on Thursday afternoon in the Austrian capital, we left things in the hotel, we cleaned the sweats of the trip in the shower and headed to the School of Economics and Business of the University of Vienna.

We arrived, gave our names in letter to the young people who were at the reception and put the stickers they had written on their chest. To put ourselves in, we realized that there were people looking curiously, I knew we were Basques announcing the conference programs. They welcomed us and we knew the whispering that, except for the round table in which we participated, was the indispensable help to be able to follow a full conference in German.

Media ownership

On Friday morning we had the opportunity to visit the city a little, to visit Karl Marx Hof, a former massive imperial with a quieter suburb, and to eat at 12:00 noon hard bought from a Kurdish kebab seller at the height of a metro station. Very European.

He took us to Vienna in the afternoon as Common Journalism. Media ownership beyond capitalism. Transform!, a reference to some aspects of the European Left ARGIA received last year the invitation to participate in the round table promoted by the Europe network, together with four other media working in Europe from a transformative perspective. Inés Schwerdtner, editor-in-chief of the German magazine Jacobin, Ulli Weish, Director of Free Radio Orange of Vienna, Boyan Stanislavski, of the digital medium Baricada of Eastern Europe, was finally unable to attend Constantinos Poulis, the Greek media The Press Project, and Belaraitz Launch, of ARGIA. Moderated by researcher Sevda Can Arslan and member of KriKoWi.

First, Can Arslan asked participants about the legal form, ownership and organization of their media. Stanislavski from Baricada intervened. He clarified that his company is a typical limited liability company with three partners (S.L. in the Spanish state). SARL in France), particularly for practical reasons. He pointed out that bureaucratic obstacles to the creation of cooperatives or foundations in Eastern Europe are too high and on the other hand they are considered more suspect than traditional enterprises. According to Schwerdtner of Jacobin magazine, his has the same legal form, but he is also a social economy company. However, he stressed that they have intentions beyond the social economy model, clarifying that theirs is a socialist journal. He added that Jacobin is politically and economically independent of German parties and other groups.

Weish, from Orange radio, highlighted the diverse nature of radio. In fact, it was conceived as a pirate radio in 1998 and is today a community radio that speaks in 25 languages and has 220 radio programmes, maintaining the initial spirit. He explained that as a free and open radio, participants and sessions are constantly changing, trying to track the profile of participants and staff and the content of radio programmes. There are currently twelve workers, but a total of 500 radio amateurs are involved. They organize radio courses for people to do their radio shows, but they also address issues like linguistic diversity, anti-racist and non-sexist language.

When the ARGIA turn came, being a small project of a small language, attendees were surprised to hear that it has 103 years of history. Arbelaitz talked about the passing of the Light from Heaven to Light and summarized the trajectory of the project. He explained that it is currently a company with a transformative social economy, owned by workers, which is organized in the drafting, commercial and administration departments, as well as the process of horizontalization carried out in recent decades, which has involved equal pay and sharing of responsibilities.

No money without media

Following the presentations, moderator Sevda Can Arslan asked about the funding model. Because, as Schwerdtner de Jacobin stressed, making money is a constant and indispensable struggle for a media, because without money it can hardly progress. Three models emerged, the subscription model, based on commercial activity and low public funding.

To finance the first issue of the German magazine Jacobin and be able to take the lead, they published the book Socialism ABC. Schwerdtner reported that when creating the company, the publisher, the notary laughs, since today creating a left-wing editorial is not a bet, perhaps, very safe. However, the project took its first steps with the sale of the book and got subscribers that aroused people’s interest in the content published on the web. Schwerdtner stressed that without the Internet at present it would not be possible to reach so many people in this type of project, but at the same time it is impossible to maintain a project of this kind without the subscription and fixed revenue that a physical product provides.

The moderator asked how to deal with the loss of paper media subscriptions, and Arbelaitz responded that ARGIA is not losing subscribers and that in the past four years it has increased by 25%. In 2016 he explained the change in the subscription model and talked about the leap from product payment to project sponsorship. As subscribers know, the financial contribution to the project is not consolidated, everyone pays what they want and can. If this change has worked thanks to the community at the bottom of the middle, and after two years of reflection, we could see that the refined model is unique in Europe. At the round table, Arbelaitz stressed that since the change took place, many community members invest more than average, and as a result it is sent free of charge to vulnerable groups, political prisoners and those who were unable to pay for the explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Stanislavski de Baricada, in Bulgaria there is no culture of subscription and offer other services to finance the activity of its media, especially those related to communication. There are many orders from Western Europe, for example design and printing works in the places where they are located, as it is often cheaper to export them afterwards. However, he stressed that the fact that all the workers they hire are in good condition and pay all the wages is basic to them. He summarized his vision: “The people on the left also know how to manage business and better than the right, without traps.”

Another thing is the Orange radio. Public funding is essential for them. He denounced, among other things, corruption and paternalism in this field in Austria. He stressed that they have about three million listeners and that their programs can be heard in waves, live internet and archive. He denounced that at some point right-wing parties wanted to sell radio as a problem by financing it with public money, and explained that the amount distributed to the mass media through advertising and other aids is much larger.

Beyond capitalism

Relevant approaches to the role of transformative media were also discussed. Cross-border cooperation and the dissemination of messages were also mentioned. Stanislavski stressed that it is very important for them not to talk about superiority with the public so that the message is opened. As for collaboration, he believes, and he said it with a point of hostility, that today there are many small left-wing media that “do the same” in the world, but it is very difficult to add because the realities are very different. However, he added that the community, that unity, is essential. In the current scenario, unfortunately, "there are many generals who want to mount their show but few soldiers."

Arbelaitz also raised the possibility and need to cooperate with other media, and the Creative Commons licenses allowed it. He stressed that the main media, those on the right, have one second news agencies to spread the same news around the world, against which the small media on the left should feed each other, as some reach places where others do not arrive. However, ARGIA was the only media that used the CC licence among the Round Table.

Jacobin magazine was born in the United States and has since been implemented in other countries, including Germany. Schwerdtner said they are a kind of franchise. This allows them to translate and publish the contents of Jacobin editions in other languages. Currently, 25% of its texts are translated from other languages. He stressed that translation is not only about changing the language text, but about bringing other cultural contexts to its cultural scope. They often bet on bringing foreign issues into German which, although not the most read, provide valuable information on the situation elsewhere in the world.

Utopia?

Since we are not beyond capitalism, it is hard to imagine the media beyond capitalism, that became clear. The media can propose approaches to overcome capitalism at best, to do a journalism that contradicts the dominant narrative and to communicate and promote resistance. One of the questions raised from the public was how the media represent their media in a context beyond capitalism.

Without reaching this point, the participants of the table stood in an “intermediate space”. As an anecdote, Arbelaitz said that the process of changing the subscription model also studied the possibility of withdrawing money from the center and, for example, taking the concept of time banks, it was thought to propose in exchange for sending the magazine computer tasks or accepting oranges. Stanislavski said with humor that the idea was good, but that it would be better to exchange with wine producers than with oranges.

Schwerdtner commented that they would like to overcome the specialization of the work, so that the people of the work team have the opportunity to perform other work that interests them. Rarely can we talk about other models of media ownership and practices, even thinking and sharing ways that move away from what is now spreading, and listeners, researchers and activists mostly listened with interest to what has been said.

The weekend was an opportunity to share concrete media experiences at the academic conference and get to know projects moving in similar coordinates. Of course, on the edges of the conference program and in the desserts of dinner.

The ARGIA project has been the first time we have explained it in an international forum where we have noticed curiosity and interest. As a curiosity, someone commented that the work we are doing in ARGIA is a “utopia” in the media, almost with shame. We have returned to Euskal Herria revitalized with the perspective that gives away or see things from the eyes of another person and devastated with the strength of the ARGIA project and the community in which it is fundamental.