Greek journalists return to work unpaid for what may be paper's last edition

Eleftherotypia was Greece's second-biggest newspaper, a centre-left daily with a proud tradition of independent reporting and opinion. Founded after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, its name means "freedom of the press". With the exception of a couple of special editions brought out by its staff, it has not been published since last December. Its 800 employees – writers, editors, production staff, print and support workers – have not been paid their salaries since last August.

Yannis Bogiopoulos, a former feature writer, is a senior subeditor on the politics desk. At 50, he earned €2,000 a month. His wife, a foreign news editor and one-time correspondent, worked for the paper too. She declared herself redundant so that the couple – who have no children – at least had one source of income: her unemployment benefit of €600 a month. But like many of the rest of the staff, Yannis has stayed, stuck in some Greek legal no-man's land that has gone far beyond industrial action.

There have been individual court cases, most of which the employees have won, and Eleftherotypia's owners were recently denied court protection from creditors. But there's still no money. "I want to save my work, and save this paper," Yannis says. "And, yes, for political reasons – this was a good paper and I believe in it. It campaigned against corruption; we were sued by politicians, often. It opposed the terms of the international bailout, from the start. This was a strong, free, independent voice on the left. Nobody ever told me what to write. Not once."

So this week, more than 120 journalists and production staff have gathered again in the paper's offices, preparing a third and, very possibly, final special edition, to be published on the day before the general election re-run that could be so crucial for Greece's future. It will run to a full 80 pages of news and comment, like the old days, and from the support they are getting, on Twitter and elsewhere, they are confident they will sell at the very least 50,000 copies, at €1.30 a pop.

"We're making one last effort," says Christos Zervas, a senior roving reporter. "We want to send a message to the public, the market and our owners that we are still here, that we can still make a very good newspaper, that plenty of people will still buy it, and that something should now be done."

Partly, of course, Eleftherotypia is a victim of the 21st century's fast-changing media landscape; these are not profitable times for newspapers anywhere. But the shame is it was far from stuck in the past; before it was eventually closed down, its website was the most popular of any Greek media organisation. Partly, too, the paper has fallen foul of some remarkably incompetent management decisions by its owners. (There are plenty who are convinced the decision to allow it to close was at least as much political as financial; Eleftherotypia was certainly not the darling of Greece's last government.)

Mainly, though, Eleftherotypia had the misfortune to suffer those twin blows in a country whose economy is pretty much in freefall: in its fifth straight year of recession, Greece's GDP has now shrunk by 17%. So all in all, the work being put in by the staff in Eleftherotypia's downtown Athens offices this week – calling editorial meetings, dashing out after stories, arguing fiercely (this is Greece), drinking too much coffee, smoking too many roll-ups, behaving for all the world as if this is what they still do for a living – may well prove futile.

What will happen to them then, and the paper, after Saturday? Some have already taken matters into their own hands: with 40-odd colleagues, most of them from Eleftherotypia, George Tsakiris, former defence correspondent, is launching an online, customisable daily newspaper later this month called With Signature. "We must do something," he says. Costas Kiriakopoulos, another senior reporter, agrees: "We need new starts," he says: "New platforms for journalism, new business models for media, new ways of working for us. Everything needs to start anew. Like Greece, in fact." But there, says Yannis, more than 1,000 unemployed journalists in Athens now. There is some work, but it's not reporting, it's recycling, cutting and pasting from agencies and the internet, long hours at a screen and no money – €300 a month, who can survive on that? – for some new media start-up. Yannis and some others hope Eleftherotypia can still rise from the ashes as a smaller, leaner co-operative, run by its staff for its staff. "I think co-ops, more broadly, are the way ahead, to restart the economy," he says. "People have always helped people in Greece. We have to get back to that."

That would be a return to the paper's roots; it was owned by its journalists in the 1970s. But the process would be long and legally complicated: the paper's name and considerable assets (its office and printing plant are worth a lot of money) are still the property of its owners. But there's still the question of money to live. Zervas and Kiriakopoulos talk of having survived these past 10 months without pay thanks to "personal Marshall plans" from friends, family, in-laws. Yannis says he and his wife have had no such luck: "We come from quite poor families. There's no money. In December, my wife's unemployment benefit will end. After that, I don't know what will happen. The tragedy is, with good management, this paper could have survived. There's talent and commitment enough here to achieve anything."