Spain loses three Galician-language news sites

Posted by Clara Martínez Turco on August 19, 2010 at 8:46 AM

A Peneira, a biweekly newspaper published in the Spanish region of Galicia, has shut down its website due to financial problems, Periodistadigital.com reported Tuesday. This is the third Galician-language website to close in less than a month.

The newspaper's owner, Guillermo Rodriguez, said the regional government was responsible for the economic distress of the company, which has not paid its workers in six months and might see its print edition at risk, Prnoticia.com revealed.

The Galician administration recently reduced the subventions given to media published entirely in Galician from €71,000 to €64,000.

However, in an article published in its editorial blog, A Peneira explained that its revenue has been decreasing since 2009, when the publication only gained €84,000, down from €180,000 collected in 2008.

The publication also noted that the regional government had not bought advertising in the paper for the first four months of 2010, while other official ads had declined by 50 percent.

A Peneira's announcement comes after Galician-language news sites Vieiros.com and Chuza!, a news aggregation portal, stopped their publications in July, Prnoticias.com explained. Both media had reported financial problems.