Citizen Journalism in Italy
Italian citizen journalism has increased exponentially since the early 2000s with the main newspapers’ and televisions’ introduction of online blogs dedicated to citizens’ contributions, and, more remarkably, with its proliferation on social media and dedicated independent platforms (Battaglia 2019). One such platform is Fanpage. Launched in 2010, it is now among the “top five news players” online along with the main national newspapers, the established commercial TV broadcasters, and the main Italian news agency in terms of audience reach. (Cornia 2019)
The success of Italian citizen journalism coincided not only with the advent of the revolutionary affordances of the Web 2.0 but also with a decade of an overt lack of pluralism in the press under media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi’s government leadership. A corrupt environment that witnessed a strong decline in the public’ trust in media. Sileoni and Vigevani (2016) noted that “even if it was not a formal ownership concentration, […] Berlusconi controlled Rai as Prime Minister and the three major private stations as his own property” (p 142).
Ipsos’ 2019 survey of net trust[i] in media shows that Italians trust personal friends (38%) over public sources of news (3%). Although the public has a general distrust of online platforms and social media (0%), these have now caught up with television as the main source for news (Cornia 2019). These statistics seem to align Italians with the audiences studied by Koc-Michalska et al. (2020) in the fact that “how they view the veracity of news and political information—whatever the accuracy of those views—is associated with political use of social media, discussion, and exposure to counter-attitudinal information” (p. 462) Conceivably, a healthy scepticism and attitude in a country that ranked fourth out of twenty-seven in the 2015 research “Level of risk to pluralism in the political and the market domain in European Member States” (Bárd 2016).
Meikle and Young (2012) show that “personal communication and public media converge with unpredictable consequences […] blurring the lines between one-to-one and public communication” (p 77). Communication can then be manipulated and exploited to the advantage of populism as shown by Donald Trump in the USA and by the far-right political and social media celebrity Matteo Salvini in Italy (Donadio 2019). Such undesirable examples are counterbalanced by cases like the citizens’ response in the aftermath of the devastating 2009 earthquake of the city of Aquila, Italy. A grass-roots movement arose as locals spontaneously started posting on social media to report on-the-ground images and stories in stark contrast with the government’s exploitation of the disaster as an opportunity to publicly promote a false propaganda of promptness in reconstruction and financial and social support (Farinosi and Treré 2014).
I welcome the growth of independent voices as fundamental expressions of the democratic need of counteracting the hegemony of any establishment. Although even mature bottom-up journalism is not immune to the risks of replicating the political and ideological biases of the current establishment, when grassroots retains freedom of expression there will be diversity and impetus for growth and resilient adaptation to whatever the new social challenges may be.
Reference list
Bárd, P, 2016 ‘A Comparative Analysis of Media Freedom and Pluralism in the EU Member States’, available at < https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/571376/IPOL_STU(2016)571376_EN.pdf> viewed August 2020
Battaglia, R 2019 ‘Giornalismo Civico e Giornalismo Partecipativo: Cosa Sono e Perché’ Rivistamicron
<https://www.rivistamicron.it/terza-pagina/giornalismo-civico-e-giornalismo-partecipativo-cosa-sono-e-perche/>, viewed August 19 2020
Cornia, A, 2019 ‘Digital News Report: Italy’ for The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, <http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2019/italy-2019/>, viewed August 20 2020
Donadio, R 2020 ‘The New Populist Playbook’, The Atlantic, <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/matteo-salvini-italy-populist-playbook/597298/>, viewed August 19 2020
Farinosi, M, & Treré, E 2014 ‘Challenging Mainstream Media, Documenting Real Life and Sharing with the Community: An Analysis of the Motivations for Producing Citizen Journalism in a Post-Disaster City’, Global Media and Communication
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1742766513513192>, viewed August 20 2020
Ipsos 2019 ‘Global Advisor Trust in Media 2019’
<https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2019-06/global-advisor-trust-in-media-2019.pdf>, viewed August 20 2020
Koc-Michalska, K, Bimber, B, Gomez, D, Jenkins, M & Boulianne, S 2020 ‘Public Beliefs about Falsehoods in News’, The International Journal of Press/Politics
<https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220912693>, viewed August 19 2020
Sileoni, S & Vigevani, GE 2016 ‘Media Pluralism in Italy’ in Bárd, P, 2016 ‘A Comparative Analysis of Media Freedom and Pluralism in the EU Mem ber States’, available at < https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/571376/IPOL_STU(2016)571376_EN.pdf>, viewed August 20 2020
Stefanini, S 2012 ‘Citizen Journalism in Italy’, European Journalism Observatory - EJO (blog)
< https://en.ejo.ch/digital-news/citizen-journalism-in-italy>, viewed August 19 2020
[i] A net score refers to % trust a great deal or a fair amount MINUS % do not trust very much or at all (here and on all other slides) Base: 19,541 online adults aged 16-74 (18-74 in select countries) across 27 countries, from January 25 – February 8, 2019 (Ipsos 2019)