Word: news
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...nation where the Prime Minister controls the airwaves, only one out of 10 people buys a daily paper, compared with one in five Americans and three in five people in Japan, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Italians, it seems, don't care to read the news...
...what if the fault doesn't lie with Italians' appetite for news? What if the problem is with what's on the menu? At a literary festival in central Sardinia last month, I had a chance to feel the public's dissatisfaction with what was on offer. During a panel on the media, when I observed that Italian journalists seem to write mostly for each other, for politicians, or for the pleasure of reading their own prose, the audience clapped its approval. For much of the following hour, questioners demanded to know why the news wasn't being written...
They deserve an answer. Not much has changed in the 50 years since the political journalist Enzo Forcella declared that the Italian newspaper was written for just 1,500 readers: ministers, parliamentarians, party leaders, union bosses and industrialists. News is reported, he wrote, in an "atmosphere of family discussion, with protagonists who have known each other since childhood, exchanging jokes, speaking a language of allusions...
...lite, says Paolo Mancini, a professor of the sociology of communications at the University of Perugia. The culture pages of the major dailies have the air of an academic journal. Graphics and layout are dense and often confusing. Photos are usually portraits of the same tired faces. When political news breaks, the front pages can feature as many as five articles on the subject by leading journalists providing individual takes. Yet context or background is rarely provided. "The reader of the printed press already knows what's going on," says Mancini. "They have the news. What they want is gossip...
...wonder Italians are increasingly turning to alternative sources of information. The last few years have seen the rise of free dailies, handed to commuters outside subway stops. With limited budgets that rule out big-name commentators, they've had to offer their readers something new: straight news. On a recent Thursday, when the front page of La Repubblica offered three articles on Berlusconi's admission that he was "not a saint," the free Metro carried a much more relevant headline: "H1N1: 15 Million Youth To Be Vaccinated." Online, Beppe Grillo, a comedian turned political blogger, has a large, vocal following...