Hekimen General Assembly on multi-year grants

He appointed Elhuyar and Jakin to replace Gazteberri and Xaloa Telebista

The Basque Media Association Hekimen held last Friday its annual assembly at the Martin Ugalde Cultural Park, where it approved the 2015 memory and the 2016 action plan. At the same meeting, the assembly appointed Elhuyar and Jakin magazine as members of the management, replacing Gazteberri and Xaloa Telebista. He also accepted the new partner of Zinea.eus.

The General Board analyzed the issue of government grants, in particular the multi-year call for proposals planned by the VPL for the coming years and agreed to make public its opinion on this issue.

One of the objectives of Hekimen, the Association of Basque Media, has been to work since its creation a long-term approach with the administration for stability and development of the sector. In 2015 the association wanted to work in depth this work and from January to July we held several meetings with representatives of the VPL. In these meetings, in order to diagnose the sector, we share a lot of interesting information about audiences, scope, potential audience, public investment or social value of the media.

Hekimen wants to emphasize that he has always believed in the importance of these meetings. We're not just talking about increased public investment. We talked about the situation of the sector, the weaknesses and strengths and talked about the administrative intervention. We want to emphasize that Hekimen has shown a collaborative attitude and we have placed this offer within the Observatory of the Basque Media, a space in which universities, administrations and the sector itself of the Basque Country would talk about the role, objectives and cranes of the Basque media. The agreement signed on 14 January in Bilbao together with the UPV/EHU, the University of Deusto and Mondragon Unibertsitatea gave a great boost to the project.

This attitude of collaboration, in turn, has helped us overcome the obstacles we have encountered along the way and has led us to make new approaches: not only have we proposed changes in the annual call for grants, but we have reflected on the distribution of institutional advertising and have launched working groups so that the sector is considered as industry.

Since 2010, budgets for the Basque media have fallen.

Advertising is known to be an important source of media revenue. Well, the government only makes 3% of the institutional advertising in the media of popular initiative. The association has proposed on more than one occasion to introduce linguistic criteria in public advertising campaigns, but to date the government has not taken steps to do so. In recent years, the VPL has recovered the subsidies for the promotion of Basque in the media in Spanish (400,000 € in the last call): the increases for the media have therefore been for the media in Spanish.

Promoted by the Hekimen association, various companies and associations around Basque culture met throughout 2015 to reflect on creative industries within the framework of the reflection that is taking place throughout Europe. Among the media, publishers and representatives of the language industry, the music sector and audiovisual associations, we produced a document in which we have worked to connect the dialogue between the departments of Culture and Industry.

As for the rest of the administrations, the new Government of Navarra has assigned to the call for grants to the Basque media a similar amount to that which the UPN government had been earning and we cannot consider it sufficient. The contribution of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia has decreased in recent years. The call of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa is delayed due to the problems that can be generated with European subsidies, but there are increases in the call for local television (38%) and ICT (31%). For its part, the Provincial Council of Alava has significantly increased its contribution this year: From 10,000 to 50,000 €.

As a result of these reflections, the association made a concrete economic approach to the VFL in July last year. It worked on the proposal to recover the public effort during the period 2008-2010, which represents about 0.06% of the global budget. This would mean a contribution of almost 1.5 million euros to the sector. In addition, we provided a variable and measurable bag associated with a million year reach, quality, innovation or strategy criteria. All this related to the multiannual proposal. It was an open approach.

The budgets approved by the Basque Government for 2016, for the first time, concretize the multiannual public effort through commitment credits: 11,46 million € until 2019. That is, the government that will leave the elections to be held this fall will have for the Basque media the same budget as in the last five years. The same money for eight consecutive years and without possibility to discuss the criteria.

Hekimen means that the multi-year approach is good for the sector, but the equality of money and the call without discussing the criteria with the sector cannot be considered enough because it is not what Hekimen asks for and does not guarantee the stability and development of the entire sector.

Hekimen, therefore, wants to ratify his commitment to the next government to continue working on a stable and effective long-term approach.

Andoain, March 2016