Alessandro Barbano's interview - The futur of information

The international editorial system is in a phase of difficulties and experts onto the economic responsibility for this situation. But she does not believe that our publishing system, unlike the foreign counterparts, both inside plagued by problems that could not solve and that it was dragged over the years? I refer particularly to the absence in Italy of pure publishers or chronic disaffection of young people in public newspapers, acuitasi with the digital revolution. What do you think?

Surely there is a crisis of the system due to changes in the world and this is evident from the fact that the time of the news today is the real time. Publishing the paper moves on a daily / weekly and this is no longer the time for action but the story is the time to study and selection. The journal should become an instrument not to give news, but to penetrate the complexity of events and phenomena that readers already know. This is the true revolution compared to 30/40 years ago. This means that those who are interested in access to the complexity are the part of citizens who participate directly or indirectly in the life decision-making of society, ie the ruling class and the part of society that aspires to be leaders. This is the data structure that regulates the relationship between reader and paper publishing, then there is an aspect related to the fact that young people 18 - 34 years including my students also do not read newspapers, and most prefer to access information through internet. As for publishers impure, actually think the real problem of our publishing is that of cultural products: the selection of news, the same hierarchy, the same analysis, interpretation of events and excessive space given to politics in our daily newspapers. This is just the effect that the publisher wants impure do business with politics? Well, I do not think it would be too simplistic. Surely the Italian editorial component has strong interests in the political world, but this also happens in other democracies elements with assurance of our most visible, but the influences are there and sometimes clearly visible. The Italian problem is cultural and the professional culture of Italian journalism is strongly influenced by the culture of the Palace, and is influenced by what I call the "primacy of politics" that is the tendency to reduce the cultural calendar in the category of political dominance by a political in information. This is a formula which ignores the demands of the Italian company that over time has changed and that this prevalence has no policy in the request for information.

Philip Meyer in his book The Vanishing Newspaper claims that in 2040 we will be the death of the daily paper that you believe in this idea or think that the newspaper will find in himself the strength to survive by continuing to accompany us in our lives as well as in the last 300 years?

Actually there is Jacques Attali who says in his book "A Brief History of the Future" that when we are in possession of those objects and polyfunctional nomads far superior to the iphone, which will see the tv, listen to the radio, will serve as by credit card, keys etc, then read the newspaper through these objects. We need to see what will happen when these opportunities. There are three hypotheses: either the paper should trasmodare journalism in the on-line with a model different from the current one (though we wonder if the big interviews, surveys, further work on the internet), or extinguished, or continue to exist . I believe that it will continue to exist even if in a more marginal as a second level of training of leaders, while the bulk of the finish on the internet.

E 'of these days the news of the downgrading of a country with semi-freedom of information according to the report dell'House of Freedom, the American company that takes care to draw up an annual report on health status of press freedom in countries world. What is your idea about this?

I believe that this is an ideological reading because, for my experience, I do not see the Italian democracy into question, in danger or threatened from without by the concentration of powers. I think the exact opposite: in our country's freedom is threatened by cultural weakness, lack of cultural models to strive for. We passed by a company but provided ideological large mink of reality, I think the weight of Communist ideology, or the great visions Catholic years animated throughout the twentieth century, to a company deideologizzata in which the fall of these models if they are not replaced other suitable to our time. This fragility is reflected in the cultural ability to read the newspapers and going to affect the market [...]. That is why our freedom of the press is attacked from within, from the civil culture of the country, not by power or impure's political shift, which also play their role, but by the mere fact that we are weak [.. .]. Press freedom is fragile due to a conformist and a cultural weakness of the country and if the centers of knowledge back to produce knowledge also the attitude of the press would change accordingly. These slow processes not resolved by a change in the legislature.

Back to talk of a crisis: what are the initiatives that the messenger was prepared to try to tackle the economic difficulties of this period and keep the leading role of newspaper in the capital?

Well, fortunately, the crisis has benefited us as to the roots of our newspaper as other newspapers that have a cultural identity, the weakest suffer most, as we managed to defend our position in the market probably because the Roman citizen was recognizes the patterns proposed by the newspaper. We are also concerned us from the processes of crisis but this empathy and this identity we have protected and we are a newspaper that does not lose yet. This is proof of that support of this before: the newspapers that are perceived as a key access to complex can combat the difficulties of the crisis and this makes the difference between a newspaper with a soul and one without.

Now to conclude I wanted to ask a question of a more personal: he has a plan, a dream for the messenger of the future, which could help further the roots with your readers?

To answer this question I can make a parallel literature, I think the historical novel manzoni leading player in the history of the humble: I believe that journalism today has the task of bringing to the scene of the citizens, the people. Then everything can be told within the existential dimension of the same readers, so that the journal becomes a mirror of reality and allows readers to understand what changes. That is the crisis not only tells you the index of GDP or industrial production or all the views of economists, the crisis also tells you how you change the daily reality, with people losing jobs, precarious that young vedono change their dreams and their future, telling those who also work has changed and the crisis has made money or with the history of immigrants who are wavering on their process of integration. What I hope is that the representation of phenomena journalism increasingly taking account of the fallout existential phenomena themselves have on a population. Often the reality changes with the numbers, but often journalism can grasp this change into a personal universe, this is a more challenging if it has a sort of function together literary and intellectual calendar which I think the most noble part of our profession. This is essentially a dream.