The history of Galician language press is very long, tracing back to the early 20th century’s renowned newspaper A Nosa Terra. Notwithstanding its prolific past, present-day situation is bleak, with no printed Galician-medium press now. The last such daily, Galicia Hoxe, a periodical created by the newspaper El Correo Gallego, vanished in 2011, after a short 8-year path on the market, due to economic reasons following its poor sales performance.
By contrast, the health of digital press in Galicia is sounder, including four active digital newspapers, i.e. Sermos Galiza, Galicia confidencial, Praza Pública, or Diário Liberdade.
Precisely the digital newspaper Sermos Galiza announced in late 2017 its plan to release a printed daily in Galician in order to fill the present-day gap. The main goal of the new daily would be to “offer from a Galician standpoint incisive information and analysis to the Galician people”. Xoán Costa, management board chief executive of Sermos Galiza, notes that a Galician-medium daily is paramount to “let us count our history, instead of leaving that to outsiders”. The name of the new daily will be O Diario Galego.
In order to make the new media outlet financially sustainable, Sermos Galiza launched a campaign at the end of 2018 to secure 3,000 subscriptions. This September they had received over half that number. They are well on their way and, should they meet their challenge, O Diario Galego will be due out in summer 2019. Their intention is to publish it 6 days a week, from Tuesday to Sunday, with no publishing on Monday.
The status of printed press written in native languages across European stateless nations varies greatly from one nation to the other. Most stateless nations have no printed dailies in their native language. Exceptions exist for those peoples that have languages of other states, such as Flanders, speaking in Dutch, or South Tyrol, speaking in German, with two other nations standing out: Catalonia and Basque Country.
Summarizing, the list of European stateless nations with regards to printed dailies breaks down as follows:
- BRITTANY: No daily press
- SCOTLAND: No daily press
- BASQUE COUNTRY: Newspaper BERRIA
- FLANDERS: 8 dailies in Dutch
- FRIESLAND: No daily press
- WALES: No daily press
- GALICIA: In the pipeline (O Diario Galego)
- SOUTH TYROL: 2 dailies in German
- CATALONIA: 7 dailies in Catalan
- NORTH OF IRELAND: No daily press
- CORSE: No daily press
- SAPMI: Daily AVVIR
- OCCITANIA: No daily press
- SARDINIA: No daily press
Please find the link to the project O Diario Galego here:
www.odiariogalego.gal/participa/