Seventy-Four stops here

O Seventy-four stay here. Almost three years after its launch on July 13, 2021, the Seventy-four ends this Thursday for exclusively financial reasons. The project had been facing financial difficulties for several months and our small editorial team did everything possible and impossible to ensure that the Seventy-four continued on the path. But our permanent stubbornness has come up against a wall, and there is a moment when the fighting spirit is no longer enough.

We always knew this could be the outcome. We knew the challenge we would face when we started designing the Seventy-four in August 2020. We knew our editorial line and strategy, the journalism we wanted to do or not do, the contributions we wanted to make to strengthen democracy and social rights. We knew the next steps to take. But we also knew that financing journalism in Portugal, whether public or private, is a desert. The risk of failing was great, but we moved forward anyway.

We dared to challenge the “journalism crisis” in the middle of the pandemic and found a research newspaper based on different journalism: one that positioned itself in the progressive field, fully committed to democracy, that challenged the extreme right and hate speech and all forms of discrimination. We succeeded, but we came up against the same wall as always: financing.

We faced it for almost three years, always guaranteeing editorial quality, but we were unable to defeat it. Today we maintain the opinion we had when we started, that a journalistic project like this is necessary for the health of democracy, even more so when we celebrate 50 years of the 25th of April and Portuguese democracy with 50 far-right deputies in parliament.

Today, we announce the end of a project to which we dedicated ourselves body and soul. We do so with great sadness, but with our heads held high: we are fully aware of the path we have taken, the contributions we have made with our journalism and that we have fulfilled the mission we set out to do from the beginning. We didn’t sit on the fence. If we had more resources, we would have done more. If we had more resources, we would do more. There were so many projects and investigations on the agenda.

In recent years, the small newsroom of the Seventy-four It did the possible and the impossible: it was divided into major investigations and weekly editions, always with the inexhaustible effort and dedication of its designer, Rafael Medeiros. It published nine investigations, on average one every three months, on topics of undeniable public interest (we denounced the practices of sexual orientation conversion, we revealed sexual violence in hospitals and private practices, we exposed the far-right infiltration of the security forces, we scrutinized a murder committed by boneheads, we covered the shady dealings of Luís Filipe Vieira) and we published editions every week – dozens of interviews, reports, long articles, essays and chronicles. O Seventy-four contributed to a more open democratic debate.

However, he did not do it alone: ​​he had the more than essential support of more than two hundred essayists, freelance journalists (Diogo Augusto, Tiago Carrasco, Cláudia Marques Santos, Marta Pequena, among others) and resident chroniclers. A big thank you to each and every one. Many thanks to Bicycle Thieves, República dos Pijamas, Manifesto magazine, Ana Rita Governador, Bárbara Carvalho, Teresa Coutinho, Diogo Faro, Filipe Vargas, Guilherme Trindade and Paula Cardoso. Thank you very much.

The path taken so far would be impossible without the support of almost two thousand people who signed the Seventy-four and who did not let go of our hand when we went through great financial difficulties, contributing to our crowdfundings. We know the effort with which they did so in a country dominated by precariousness, low wages and great social inequalities, when the cost of living was constantly rising. They could have just looked away. After all, our content was free anyway. We believe they did so because they see journalism as an essential public good for democracy and believe in the importance of non-profit journalism when democracy is threatened from within. Many, many thanks to those who supported us and to those who read us.

O Seventy-four It stops here, but not its journalists. Our democracy faces threats it thought it had escaped. History does not repeat itself, but there are historical continuities and the extreme right gains ground with each election, Portugal would not be an exception in Europe. Journalism committed to democracy and human rights, which guided us in Seventy-Four, is even more necessary today. Our mission remains.

O Seventy-four That’s it, but it didn’t have to be like this. Our end is not special, it is similar to that of so many newsrooms that have already disappeared across this country. And the problem is always the same: financing, not editorial quality. And this contributed to the fact that Portugal lives in a complete contradiction with the majority of European Union member states: it does not have any public financing policy for journalism nor a strong patronage sector. It is the desert, and more newsrooms will face their end if we do nothing as a society.

We have been hearing about the “journalism crisis” for so long that we have ended up naturalizing it, as if there were no alternatives. The traditional journalism business model is dead and buried and we all know it. Hence, there is no shortage of public policy proposals for financial support from different civil society actors to reverse the trend of ever-increasing news deserts. The diagnosis is more than made, but the actions are slow to arrive.

The political power, which entertains itself by weaving praises of love for journalism, always highlighting its importance for democracy, did nothing, and newsrooms disappeared from year to year. Misinformation is rampant in society, fueled by the fragility of journalism and promoted by social media, and the extreme right has left the margins of politics to enter the sovereign bodies in force. Journalism, this public good, was relegated to the totalizing logics of the market.

State intervention in the economy has been demonized, except when it occurs in defense of the interests that dominate our economy. The market continues to be deified, even with so many examples of failure, as being the solution for everything and everyone. But the market turns everything into merchandise, and it is up to the State to stop it. Because we increasingly need strong, plural and diverse journalism. A journalism dependent on market forces to survive will not be a journalism capable of scrutinizing these same forces.

It’s time to get our heads out of the sand, it’s time to finally debate public financing of journalism, financing that is direct, structural, transparent and independent of political and economic powers. It’s time to break taboos and do everything we can to save journalism, we have no time to waste. Because a society without journalism is not democratic. We know this backwards and forwards, let’s finally move on to action.