La sale of the publishing company of La Stampa by Fiat is perhaps more than any other sign, the testimony of the end of an era and the opening of a different phase in the economic history of this country. Gone are the good living rooms, the powers that be are gone, the links, sometimes perverse, between captains of industry and politics are weakening. Now you have to navigate the open seas, face the world if you want to thrive.
Entrepreneurs' entry into newspapers was the consequence of close relations with political buildings and the need to control a slice of public opinion in a deeply politically and socially divided society. Fiat had entered La Stampa on the recommendation of Mussolini, but after the Second World War it had made the newspaper a bulwark of liberal culture against the intrusiveness of anti-market cultures of both Catholics and Communists. Throughout his life, Avvocato Agnelli was the guardian of journalistic independence as a founding element of a liberal society.
The newspaper has always been protected against the immediate interests of Fiat itself in the name of a higher conception of the role of free information. Owning La Stampa was considered a "civic duty", a way to maintain an open and pluralistic society, and not an instrument of power as other entrepreneurs have tried to do. Now Italy, beyond the Northern League and Grillini resurgences, is firmly anchored in the European and international context. The old political ideologies are outdated. The occupation by politics of all spaces of civil society is no longer possible.
Information can and must seek its own autonomous role in the market. Certainly the sales and advertising crisis has accelerated this process of change, pushing towards the search for concentration synergies. The merger with the Espresso-Repubblica Group serves not only to rationalize costs, but also to make investments in new technologies possible and accelerate the process of transforming the methods of processing and disseminating information, overcoming the old schemes that the public now rejects.
I was the last CEO of Itedi and La Stampa appointed by Avv. Agnelli a month before his disappearance. The mission was to restore the accounts of the newspaper which was already losing a few million a year in 2002, maintaining it as an important and qualified voice on the national information scene. The crisis at that time was quickly overcome thanks also to the economic recovery which gained strength in the middle of the decade, but it was clearly understood that from a strategic point of view it would not have been possible to maintain the positions remaining alone, in a publishing panorama which included two large groups such as Corriere della Sera and la Repubblica and above all saw the excessive power of television which drained most of the advertising.
There was no Internet but the need to invest in this field was beginning to appear on the horizon. I elaborated a plan for a merger with Secolo XIX of Genoa (with a precise calculation of the economic advantages) which could then be extended to the Gazzettino (not yet of Caltagirone) and if possible to the newspapers of Bologna and Florence. The plan was based on the loss of control by Fiat and therefore on the possibility of creating a Group owned by many shareholders and with substantial managerial guidance. Then nothing came of it due to the sudden disappearance of Umberto Agnelli who two years earlier had succeeded his brother at the helm of Fiat, and who liked the idea.
Now, more than ten years later, the knots have come home to roost. Il Secolo XIX merged last year, now the agreement with Repubblica is underway. This merger will involve not only the exit of Fiat from the family newspaper (and then the probable abandonment of Corriere della Sera as well), but also the start of a transformation of the Espresso Group hitherto closely linked to the
De Benedetti family, but which in the future will probably be less and less tied to the elderly "patron". John Elkann and Rodolfo De Benedetti courageously distance themselves from the “proprietary” philosophy of their fathers and grandfathers. They are looking for new ways. But the basic inspiration is always that of Gianni Agnelli: to maintain pluralist and quality information as an indispensable safeguard of a well-functioning democratic system.
