FIRSTonline celebrates its sixth birthday today, without forgetting the news that arrived during the night on the Manchester massacre that fills us with sadness. On 23 May 2011, in the somewhat fané but full of memories rooms of the Italian Press Office in Piazza San Silvestro in Rome, the enthusiasm and emotion of the small editorial team for the birth of the new digital newspaper were great. But great was also the uncertainty that accompanied the navigation of the new magazine in the swirling seas of online journalism. And if then someone had predicted that we would have arrived where we are today, surely none of us would have believed it. The reason was simple and can be summed up in the fact that FIRSTonline was born as a bet to try to create a quality and absolutely reliable economics and finance journal even in the jungle of the Web.
Since then it was clear to everyone that, since in 1995 online journalism had also taken its first steps in Italy, there were two challenges to face that made your wrists tremble: economic sustainability and professional credibility. For information on the Internet, these are still open and increasingly topical problems that serve to place the sixth birthday of FIRSTonline and its results, both economic and in terms of audience, in the right dimension. Today online information has outclassed that on printed paper and it is enough to compare the official diffusion data to realize this and to understand that the number of views on the Internet of paper newspaper sites is enormously higher than that of copies sold on newsstands with a ratio which is on average eight to one.
This does not mean that paper newspapers are inexorably destined to disappear and the search for new editorial models, if inspired by higher quality and greater creativity, can still guarantee a future, perhaps not rosy but nevertheless dignified, for printed newspapers. But there is no doubt that by now the main vehicle of information, and not only for the younger generations, is online through sites, web newspapers and social networks. Both because online information is often free and because it is more immediate and faster than the paper newspaper. The online is a working in progress product that has the advantage of eternal freshness, while the paper journal is a finished and more worked product, which is born and dies every 24 hours but which is a day late or a little less on the online.
Online information, both generalist and specialist, today has many more readers than paper information but, unfortunately, has not yet found, not only in Italy but in the world, the magic formula for earning money and making ends meet. Just as, in the era of fake news and so-called post-truth, the question of the reliability of online information remains open in the swamp of the Net, where truly quality sites have to struggle to be recognized and appreciated by readers.
If this is the general picture of online information, the sixth birthday of FIRSTonline tells the story of a small miracle that a newspaper with very little financial means but with infinite passion, with great commitment and with the pride of its independence has been able to build day after day.
It was not at all obvious that, without public funds and without a patron behind us, we could survive without burning capital that we never had, but we did it and also the sixth financial year of AL Iniziative Editoriali, which publishes FIRSTonline, it closes with a slight surplus and without a euro of debt, after having paid taxes and contributions and having signed contracts for those who work there.
Having the accounts in order after having created a dozen jobs, thanks to careful control of costs and revenues deriving from advertising and subscriptions to our editorial services, is no small satisfaction, but nevertheless it is what comes by the audience and by the authority that the magazine has been able to conquer.
In terms of dissemination, we are now one step away from 2 million contacts per month, with a daily average of between 55 and 60 views aggregated per day, i.e. registered and certifiable on the three platforms on which the our contents (that of the site, that of the social networks and that of the Microsoft Italia portal -www.Msn.it- of which we are official suppliers), without any manipulation and without any fraudulent purchase of external traffic with which even famous newspapers usually drug their audience data with distorting effects on the advertising market. To be clear: our 55-60 thousand contacts per day are more than the paper copies sold on newsstands by each of the major Italian economic and financial newspapers.
As for the quality of our information, the opening of credit that the Bank of Italy granted us last autumn with the FIRSTonline interview of its General Manager, Salvatore Rossi, and the interviews of the major protagonists of the economy and finance, politics and culture that we publish every weekend testify to the growing authority that the magazine has been able to achieve by betting on professionalism and competence but also on creative originality and on the refusal of any subjection to power and any unbearable self-referentiality.
Naturally, also this year we consider the results achieved so far – for which we thank first of all the readers, the subscribers and advertisers who support us, the team of journalists, collaborators and technicians – only as a starting point, which we will try to improve day after day, without living on our laurels and without losing the distinctive features that have made and still make the FIRSTonline experience unmistakable. Today we blow out the sixth candle, but the battle continues.