Some time ago I was invited to lunch in Milan by a very famous publisher. He wanted to consult me, he said, as a "person informed of the facts" (I directed “Il Tirreno”, which was selling 95 thousand copies at the time!) regarding his firm intention to give life to a popular newspaper. Thanking him for his esteem and with all possible courtesy I argued that, paradoxically, in Italy there was already a great popular newspaper, the "Corriere della Sera", then directed by Paolo Mieli. These were the days of Carlo and Camilla's love story and I pointed out to my guest that the spicy telephone interceptions between the two, Tampax and surrounding areas, had not been made public here by an emulator of the London "Sun", but by the battleship of via Solferino.
That editor was Urban Cairo and a few years later he bought the “Corriere della Sera”.
The Italian way to journalism: no distinction between "high" and "low"
Therefore the Italian way to journalism is does not provide distinctions between "high" and "low", but has been trying for at least thirty years to make one and the other coexist as in a large supermarket has a lot to do with our story, but it doesn't say everything.
10 food for thought on Italian journalism
There is no need to bore you with long analyses, which is why I will limit myself to briefly listing ten points for reflection which, if desired, can be discussed, here or elsewhere.
1. For decades costs rise and revenues fall. Distribution is the most difficult cost item to cut, and the only way would be to give up some places, as a manager suggested to the executives of the "Manifesto" on the brink of yet another survival crisis: "We are a political newspaper", they rose up, and they didn't. Too bad for them;
2. The vertical decline in advertising it preceded and followed that of copies, also because the big brands sell a large part of their turnover abroad: better dedicated websites and TV commercials;
3. The consequent foliation cutting it has reduced the spaces and with them the possibility of more robust services. Maybe the pages are reserved for "disguised advertising", editorial advertising: a virus that undermines the credibility of journalism;
4. the wave of early retirements financed by the State to relieve publishers, it has fearfully impoverished the editorial staff by depriving them of the experience and training of the more mature ones;
5. this also led to disappearance of places and rituals which contributed to providing information: the "bundle" of newspapers which forced one to read, meditate, underline, cut, archive has disappeared; there are no longer editorial meetings open to all, decisive places for suggesting themes and discussing errors; the "passing of the texts" in the presence of the editor was useful to avoid backgrounds, enrich and improve the article, suggest additions: now there is no more time and in most cases everything goes directly on the page; at “Repubblica” personal desks have been abolished and replaced by “stations” occupied once in a while by whoever happens to be, otherwise you work from home;
6. now in crisis, including in terms of image and salaries, journalism no longer has any appeal towards the best young people who are looking for other paths and other professional opportunities;
7. what Marco Cecchini remembers is true season of Tangentopoli he left a heavy legacy of professional laziness on the profession: little work to obtain information (from lawyers rather than from prosecutors), perhaps with the satisfaction of fighting against rampant corruption. Berlusconi and Berlusconism, by declaring war on a political system accused of consociativism and therefore pushing to take sides here or there, did the rest;
8. Dell'interruption of the web everything has been said and written, as far as artificial intelligence, the journalism of the future, is concerned, we are still in the early stages. I highlight only two aspects:
a) it was hoped that the revenue lost from paper would come from the internet, but this is not the case: to collect the equivalent of a copy on newsstands you would need more or less four digital subscriptions because their price is now negligible (until recently it was all free: the original sin);
b) thanks to the web, “New York Times”, “Guardian”, “Le Monde” and others were saved thanks to the advantage of a language read and spoken everywhere: to the south and north of Florence, however, even Italian sounds like a a little foreign;
9. our newspapers, however, suicidal syndrome, are filled with references to social media from which they draw political details that are of interest only to those who produced them: "Internazionale" lives, and well, ignoring almost all of this and limiting itself to compiling a reader's digest from newspapers from all over the world;.
10. conclusions? Difficult to draw, especially now that there is a rush for new newspapers publishers who are not publishers and which seem to pursue other goals. I resort again to the paradox: precisely because copies are decreasing and advertising no longer binds publishers and journalists, it would be appropriate to paraphrase Cuccia mentioned by Massimo Mucchetti: not counting copies, but weighing them, with more accurate and above all much more aggressive, not in tone and words, but in content.
**** The author was for a long time director of the newspaper Il Tirreno and the weekly magazine L'espresso
