Emily Bell, Keynote

Report Post Industrial Journalism not centred on business models even though we say at the beginning is that the advertising model has failed. Whatever comes next has to have a different model.
Post industrial journalism has to be a lot smaller.
Why post industrial? Coz journalism is not an industry anymore. Production process was all about to get stories from one end of the pipe to the other, packaging stories and pushing them through. This is not really fit for the future.
All reporting now can be done effectively with iPhone and old newsrooms can look outdated. There is no longer such a thing such the press addressing such a thing as the public.
Modern newsrooms look a bit like House of Cards' one - the new series released on Netflix. The series is about post industrial journalism and the relationship with politics . The series has been carefully crafted with data: authors knew people like Kevin Spacey for this kind of role, and he was cast for the role.
Newsrooms sometimes know they have to change but they are locked into processes and daily barriers and CMS issues … so that in the end they don't change.
We are talking here about a major shift from a losing model to a winning one.

We talked already about Homicide Watch in DC and Scotus Blog. The first had only two journalists, so they could not use the same tools of an old newsrooms. They used databases and social media to cover all homicides in DC area, and gathered large audiences. It is not monetisable and done in a non-political way, but it does imply a political angle.
Why the Washington Post don't do that? They have other processes.

Scotus Blog is a very niche blog for court reporting, but has become the most important source for the Supreme Court. They reported the decision more accurately than CNN because they had more legal expertees than CNN reporters.

Many startups replace old institutions, which are weak and have no more longevity, they are not strong anymore. Ecosystem has become a weak one for news. There is a great deal of money going to startups and the problem of sustainability for big, old newsrooms.

A MIXED ECOLOGY. The power shift has changed from the institution of the brand to the people. A fundamental change.

We need power, strength and longevity to hold power into account, as power has all the three of these qualities.

75% of people still get the news from word of mouth. In the older days you had a blog where people can comment but only 1% of people comment, only 9% of people would put a mark or share or whatever. Last year this percentage rose to near 76%. A really enormous change.

News are broken by people in St. Peters' Square waiting for the white smoke and feeding the news into the network in real time.

Even the NBA cannot sustain the big salaries and info structures of the old business model. (Jay Z example)

The aim has always been of serving the needs of the brand. We never thought how to give journalists the right tools to build the right narratives for the stories.

A modern news organisation is more like an agency model, perhaps. For the individual journalists is a big change. We need to think who to employ if we want to survive.

Specialisation is one answer.

Think about Nate Silver translating his skills as statistician into journalism, and the NYTimes decided to franchise his blog into the website, becoming one of the components of the political reporting effort in the rump up for the US elections.
He never attended the wHite house meetings and never went on a plane with Obama. He did it differently, got it right and became the most successful and authoritarian journalist in the US.

** CONTINUING ***

Lots of skills involve specialisation, thinking about new skills. The core skill will always be recognising and telling a story. It really relies on journalists knowing technical knowledge and ecosystem knowledge. Journalists will have to know where to spend their time more effectively.
A brilliant narrative writer is just another specialist. It could be that your speciality is in developing news apps, or aggregating, or health care and the pharmaceutical industry or finding great pics of cats like in BuzzFeed.
At Columbia we teach a course that combines computer science and journalism, for people working at the forefront of the industry. These are skills that people out there don't really have.

It is worth to remember that journalism is very important. We work in exceptional and difficult circumstances, and Italian people know it. Our report acknowledges that, and shows the path for change.

THANKS

We got to a point where it was hard to sustain a business without public intervention or direct public funding. Many Italian newspapers are subsidised by Government.

In the UK this idea his horrifying. Being under the Gov control is a terrible idea. A mixed model (American free-for-all one) and European is a desirable balance.

Anna Masera asks what Emily thinks about Pro Publica

Emily: people gave Pro Publica and HuffPost no credit, people thought they were not going to make it. Both proved critics wrong. Pro Publica's No Profit is still a business model. They use phenomenal new techniques to generate stories intersecting data reporting with social network. You might call it crowd-sourcing, ex examining contract superpacks amongst news channels investigation.
They scaled a business model based on an algorithm instead of sourcing it to few people, and it proved to be successful. And HuffPost proved to be scalable too.

Question from Steve Buttry about ethical challenges.

Question from the audience All newspapers in Italy are working towards a better integration between paper and online. Is this a sustainable model?

Good question. People tend to make faster progresses when things are not integrated. If you accept the print is going away in the not-too-distant future... if you accept that, the fact that digital operations will be key... then it'll make sense to work for both. If not, it does not make sense. If you are in the middle, it feels right to build a bridge. You'll see a trend now of people saying:DON'T INTEGRATE, FIND OTHER WAYS. Cost cutting will be unavoidable, but for good.

Yoani Sanchez è arrivata in Sala dei Notari.

Omero Ciai sottolinea il tenore letterario della sua produzione, prima che politico.