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Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Closed Argentine Newspapers Recuperated by Workers' Cooperatives

Between 2016 and 2017, at least six media were recuperated by their workers after they were closed or abandoned by their owners: the local newspapers La Nueva Mañana, in Córdoba; El Ciudadano of Rosario; La Portada, of Esquel; and El Correo, of Firmat; plus the newspaper Tiempo Argentino and online news site Infonews, both based in Buenos Aires. In the previous survey, referring to the period between 2010 and 2013, the Open Faculty Program registered the recuperation of only one media outlet.

[...]

"Far from having a revolutionary characteristic or being an attack on the system, it has as an important center the theme that they are all older, salaried workers, who found it practically impossible to insert themselves in the labor market," Bauni said. “The cooperative was just a legal way to defend the work,” the social scientist said, citing the Argentine Bankruptcy Law, which provides for this type of recuperation of bankrupt companies.

Social anthropologist Andrés Ruggeri, director of the Open Faculty Program, recalled that before 2016 there were cases of media that were recuperated and administered by workers' cooperatives, mostly in the interior of the country. Among them are Comercio y Justicia of Córdoba and El Diario de la Región in the Argentine Chaco, both refounded in 2002, the peak of the phenomenon of recuperated companies, and Revista Cítrica, which emerged after the end of the newspaper Crítica, in 2010.

Read the rest at the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

 

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