Italian Journalism Research Articles

Covering disability in Italian journalism. Language, practices and perspectives in mainstream and alternative media

Covering disability in Italian journalism. Language, practices and perspectives in mainstream and alternative media

Il femminicidio in rete: social media e copertura informativa del caso Cecchettin. Nuove sfide per la media education

The article proposes a reading of the connections between the logic of digital media and the contemporary critical issues of Italian journalism, focusing on the news coverage of a femicide (that of Giulia Cecchettin), which raises important cultural, political and educational questions. It is underlined the persistence of several critical issues, already highlighted by studies on the journalistic narrative of feminicide in Italy. In addition, new information circuits have been activated between news professionals and social media users, who are currently engaged in newsmaking and news searching practices. The analysis confirms the presence of dramatizing narrative stereotypes, but also new spaces for discussion and participation for individuals.

An endless struggle between discourses: How Italian journalists have been claiming their jurisdiction in the digital era

The article describes the discursive evolution of digital journalism in Italy since 2008 by drawing on a database consisting of extracts taken from 227 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists over 15 years (from 2008 to 2021). The study identifies three fundamental phases in the development of Italian digital journalism: the birth of the first online newsrooms; the spread of social media; and the data/platform turn. The article applies a new institutionalism discursive approach to investigate the impact of macro-level forces on micro-level journalists’ accounts. For this purpose, it considers excerpts from interviews in which journalists talk about change and professional jurisdiction. The following three main results emerge. 1. Political parallelism and resistance to technology have ceased to be the most prevalent features of Italian journalism; 2. In the first two periods identified, the clash of discourses is more oriented to identifying practices that may be identified as ‘journalism’ (e.g. the newcomer is a journalist who does the job differently). (C) Much of what is regarded as an uncertainty has been incorporated over time and no longer appears to be a threat, but awareness of the power of online platforms is growing.

Structure and agency in the career of a female pioneer in Italian journalism: A conversation with Anna Maria Mori

This conversation with Anna Maria Mori aims to reconstruct, through the testimony and the memories of a prominent pioneer of women’s journalism, the feminization of news making practices and cultures in Italy. From a twenty-first century perspective, the interview will retrace the evolution of women’s access to careers in Italian journalism, bringing to light the undeniable progress and the persistent areas of criticality, the asymmetries between the increasing presence and visibility gained by women journalists and their enduring underrepresentation when it comes to leadership positions in the newsroom. Having covered many different roles during her long career, which has developed through the daily press, women’s magazines, radio and television, Mori is the ideal interlocutor for the specific intent of this interview.

Borders, migrations, translations: Italian comics journalism reframing the Mediterranean crossings

ABSTRACT Comics journalism bears testimony to different kinds of stories in the context of humanitarian witnessing, including personal relationships to the people who flee conflicts and the connections we make through languages. Over the latest years, the number of refugees and other migrants who crossed the Mediterranean in search of protection or a better life in Europe increased considerably. By focusing on two Italian examples of comics journalism, this article aims to answer the question: how does Italian comics journalism contribute to shaping our understanding of the crossing of borders in the Mediterranean region? By ‘our,’ I mean people living in Europe and the Global North more broadly. Grounding the analysis in the context of theoretical comics approaches, the first section explores the storylines as it situates the work of the authors within a precise socio-political framework. The second section discusses the documentary significance of both comics within the European discourse that tend to silence people on the move. After highlighting the potential of the decolonising multilingualism approach (Phipps 2019) for Comics Studies, the conclusion calls for greater exchange between journalism, migration studies, and comics scholarship.

Non-Elitist Truth? The Epistemologies of Italian Journalists in the Hybrid Media System

Epistemology in journalism is the criterion of validity that enables journalists to distinguish the false from the true. Questioning how journalists depict reality is important especially in an age of economic and technological uncertainty. A new group of media actors involved in the news cycles is increasingly able to “hack the attention economy”; non-elite actors by the algorithmic logics of platforms tend to be increasingly regarded as influential (if not authoritative) in journalists’ decisions to transform facts into news. This study explores how in the various phases of newsmaking (i.e., discovering, gathering, spreading, and verifying news) non-elite actors are shaping journalists’ everyday epistemology in the contemporary Italian hybrid media system. This study draws on an analysis of 147 semi-structured interviews conducted with Italian professional journalists from 2008 to 2020. The results of the analysis confirmed the most conventional view about Italian journalism, that is, that journalists present knowledge essentially by using elite actors’ subjective reconstructions of reality. The integration of non-elite sources in the various stages of news production is due to an attitude of journalists aimed not so much at increasing pluralism as at producing news by providing evidence. The low level of journalists’ reflexivity in the use of web platforms, while involving some non-elite actors, appears to favor platforms themselves and their requisites.

Hyphenated Phrasal Expressions in Fashion Journalism: A Diachronic Corpus-assisted Study of Vogue Magazine

Following Barthes’s seminal Système de la Mode, there have been relatively few studies focusing on fashion journalism from a linguistic perspective. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of hyphenated phrasal expressions (HPEs) of three or more constituents in the American edition of Vogue. The Vogue corpus covers a timeframe from 2003 to 2019 to provide diachronic insights. Corpus software was used to extract and analyse all hyphenated phrasal expressions. Results showed a general rise in usage over time, with most functioning as adjectives in line with the descriptive and evaluative purposes of fashion journalism. A wide range of structural patterns reflected richly detailed and striking mental images (i.e., *-and-*, *-meets-*), multiple roles (i.e., *-slash-*, NP-NP-NP), and novelty [(*)-of-the-moment, *-to-be]. Extensive clause-like HPEs offered a particularly interesting window on the writing talents of this discourse community. The study provides a useful benchmark for contrastive studies aiming to understand to what extent HPE usage in American Vogue may influence the writing style of journalists of other language backgrounds, with particular reference to Italian fashion journalism.

Dei «Bibliotecarj» del Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia

Created as a tool for the revitalization and renewal of Italian culture in the eighteenth century, the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia represents one of the most mature and significant experiences of erudite Italian journalism. The magazine, in volume XXV, presents an accurate system of indexes, among which stands out the systematic one, articulated in 16 classes. The essay, afteran introduction concerning the most relevant structural, content and bibliographical characters of the Journal, proposes an analysis of the contributions classified under Bibliotecarj, with regard to tomes I-XXIV. The aim is twofold: on the one hand, to illustrate the nature and typology of the contents highlighted; on the other, to reconstruct the bibliographical-library orientations and trends associated with the journal and the cultural elites it represents. In conclusion, we will provide three indexes: the first one, articulated in 8 sections corresponding to the different configurations with which the literary evidence found during the research has been categorized; the second will concern the published and unpublished works found; to conclude the index of names.

La sociologia secondo Indro Montanelli

The article is an analysis of the writings of Indro Montanelli about sociology. Montanelli, probably the best known Italian journalist of the XXth Century, was, admittedly, an opponent of sociology, which he considered a pseudo-science, able only to repeat self-evident truths in an unnecessarily complicated language. Montanelli’s opposition to sociology is frequently expressed in an ironic form (and Francesco Alberoni is the main target of these ironies), but sometimes it gives rise to more complex and original analysis, as when in some post-war articles, he highlights what, in his opinion, is a link between the spread of polls and the dangers of disguised forms of totalitarianism. At the origin of Montanellian opposition to sociology lies the adherence to a pessimistic view of man and the rejection of what Wrong called the «oversocialized conception of man». From the re-reading of Montanelli’s articles on the subject, however, the appreciation for some classics of sociology such as Weber, Sombart and Pareto emerges. Some of his texts also lead to the hypothesis that his approach to reality tended, in an intuitive way, beyond any disciplinary rigor, towards a different idea of sociology, based on the ability to observe everyday life, and on the interpretation of social reality as a form of theatrical representation.The article therefore intends to capture in Montanelli’s texts on sociology a more nuanced and articulated position than the pure and simple refusal of the discipline. The analysis proposed by the article, illuminating some little-known aspects of one of the most followed opinion-leaders of Italian journalism, provides a significant contribution to understanding the difficult process of institutionalization of sociology in Italy.

Informative Contagion: The Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Italian journalism

The spreading of new Coronavirus in addition to becoming a global phenomenon, following the declaration of a pandemic state, has generated excessive access to information, phenomenon named “Infodemia” (Cinelli et al., 2020). The general purpose of the exploratory study is to investigate how the coronavirus situation is described from the journalistic communication. Starting from La Repubblica online, as a reference journalistic magazine, the study assumes that if the circulation of information helps to create a social representation of the phenomenon, the excessive accessibility to sources of information (infodemia) can be modulated by the “how” the phenomenon is described by the journalists. The methodology proposed is quanti-qualitative (mixed method). A Content Analysis (Mayring, 2004) with the SketchEngine software (Thomas, 2016) is carried out first. In support, a Diatextual Analysis (Papapicco & Mininni, 2019) was carried out. The results show the presence of the contrast vision about COVID-19 situation in Italy.

Reality versus emotions in italian journalism.

Italian infotainment, with the recent shift “from information to sensation” has made the question of the ethical dimension of newsmedia even more problematic, showing unforeseen consequences of the show perspective in newscoverage. In the paper the theme of social responsibility of the journalistic media is presented in connection with the recent changes of the digital media and their blurring of real and fiction, as well as of languages and narrative styles. A critical perspective of the “Italian declination” of show-journalism will focus on the relationship between vision of the sufferings offered to distracted viewers of planetary audiences and their concrete possibilities of a consequent action.

‘Race against race, immutable’: Pound’s fascist readings of Henry James

ABSTRACT Henry James is recognised as a major literary influence on modernism as it developed in Great Britain and the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet in the increasingly politicised writings of the modernist poet Ezra Pound, James stood for far more than literary experimentation. In Pound’s writings, the novelist figured as an author peculiarly sensitive to notions of race and cultural integrity. In this essay, I explore Pound’s creation of a ‘Fascist’ James, one whose battles on behalf of ‘civilisation’ came increasingly to signify for Pound a narrow, culturally exclusive and authoritarian world. By the late 1930s, James featured in Pound’s Italian journalism as an ideal author for his ‘Fascist Library’. With readings of Pound’s early writings on James alongside in-depth analyses of the Pisan Cantos (1948), I argue that James’s fictions of encounter between America and Europe became key to Pound’s later vision of culture – a vision increasingly marked by its emphasis on the cultural and racial unity of Europe.

Continuity and change in Italian discourse on migration: A focus on mainstream television documentaries

Abstract The goal of this article is to employ the means of critical discourse analysis to verify the contribution made by news documentaries to the discussion on the topic of migration in Italian journalism. My case studies include three documentaries screened on the national broadcaster (RAI): La neve la prima volta (Snow for the First Time) (Cataldi, 2014), Quando Youssef si mise in cammino (When Youssef Started His Walk) (Cataldi, 2015) and La lunga Marcia (The Long Route) (Ricucci, 2015). The documentaries deal with a range of issues regarding migration in the European Union, such as the construction of European external borders; policies of migrant management; human rights; prejudice towards foreigners. The article will take a closer look at lexical terms, metaphors and other rhetorical forms. Linguistic evidence has been jointly analysed with the visual construction on-screen since they both participate in the meaning-making process of the documentary as a whole.

붓차티 텍스트에 표상하는 일본 인식 : 저널과 문학 사이에서

With the recent rise in Italy of cultural interest towards East Asia, the Western world’s prejudices, misconceptions, and discriminations against East Asia, which originated from fantasies, romantic idealism, or ignorance, are being questioned. This study investigates the perceptions of Japan as depicted in the works of Buzzati, a writer who greatly influenced 20SUPth/SUP century Italian journalism and literature. Buzzati, who was the senior journalist of a major Italian daily newspaper called ‘Corriere della Sera’, visited Tokyo in 1963 to cover the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, as well as touring Japan in general, and wrote 15 articles. Based on his experience of Japan outside the boundaries of ‘reality’ as perceived by the Western world, Buzzati bridged the gap between objective observation and personal experience with literary techniques, thereby allowing his readers a closer experience of Japan.BR The combination of objective information, fantasy, elements of fairy tales, as well as literary techniques in Buzzati’s writings lies between journalism and literature and hence, was a refreshing and novel attempt. Buzzati’s ‘literary articles’ were significant because they were diverse and new, which allowed the readers to touch, feel, taste, smell, and judge, which was the way Buzzati experienced Japan, rather than passively receive objective information. However, although this form of writing was more advanced than other articles that evaluated Japan based on Western political and philosophical values, it failed to overcome the frame of Orientalism, since the articles were based on a Western man’s experience.

The dominance of institutional sources and the establishment of non-elite ones: The case of Italian online local journalism

This article presents findings from a 1-year-long ‘online news ethnography’ and 20 semi-structured interviews conducted in Italian local newsrooms. It explores journalists’ practices in their relations with sources throughout the entire process of news production: discovering, gathering, and writing news. The relation between institutional sources and journalists sees the former acquiring increasing importance for the latter. At the same time, journalists guarantee access also to a limited array of non-elite sources. The result is what can be called the ‘pluralization’ of primary definers: the extensive and unframed use of a wide range of sources (mainly institutional, but also non-elite). Whether this asymmetrical coverage reinforces or weakens conceptions of political, social, and cultural power should be investigated further, but the work of journalists as watchdogs appears to be in danger.

The mediatization of politics in the hybrid media system: The case of Italian political journalism

Abstract Despite the major changes that have occurred in the ecology of media, this article considers mediatization to be still a concept valuable for grasping and interpreting relations among political communication actors. This article analyses the use of Twitter by politicians as evidenced by journalists’ accounts (and practices). In particular, it focuses on journalistic uses of Twitter in the context of political current affairs. This article investigates how and to what degree the use of social media has changed journalists’ practices in gathering political news. Moreover, it analyses how journalists describe politicians’ use of Twitter and how they reflexively conceive whether adjustments by those politicians to the media logic exist. To this end, the studies present results from 25 semi-structured interviews with Italian journalists occupying prominent roles within the Italian news organizations most important in terms of newspaper circulations and unique visitors to their websites. The research proves that mediatization is still an important framework within which to interpret practices in the new media environment.

‘The vandals at home’: Antonio Cederna’s denunciation of the devastation of Italian cities in the postwar period

Writing for the influential magazine Il Mondo, Antonio Cederna relentlessly denounced the projects and works that endangered Italy’s historical and landscape heritage in a period – the 1950s and 1960s – characterized by processes of change that were as intense as they were disordered and contradictory. The battles he waged against the danger of Italian cities being tampered with by those whom he called ‘the vandals at home’ had a significant impact on urban development. In addition, his discourse left a deep and enduring trace in Italian journalism, urban planning and historiography. This article focuses on the early period of Cederna’s journalistic activity: it delineates the core features of his denunciation, paying as much attention to its contents as to the form and manner in which it was expressed, and it assesses the outcome and legacy of his press campaigns both on a material and a political-cultural level.

Social media strategies to protect brand image and corporate reputation in the digital era: a digital investigation of the Eni vs. Report case

Over the last decade digital technologies have significantly affected branding strategies and corporate reputation monitoring. Due to the diffusion of digital platforms, stakeholders and consumers have become more engaged in marketing strategies. Specifically, the consumer decision journey has represented a new paradigmatic shift in recent marketing literature. The advent of social networking sites has indeed caused an increase of digital touch points, which foster the connection between brand strategists and consumers. Hence, nowadays consumers may directly express their opinions about companies’ practices and products using the Internet. Because of this emerging phenomenon, modern marketing strategies are progressively focusing on preserving corporate reputations in the digital environment. In order to better understand how monitoring corporate reputations and responding to consumers to avoid the rise of negative brand perceptions, this explorative paper analyses the digital response strategy implemented by Eni, the largest Italian oil and gas company. The case explored consists of a digital investigation on Twitter, aimed at investigating how Eni’s digital counterattack strategies affected consumers’ perceptions after accusations moved by Report, a popular Italian journalism TV programme. The conclusions suggest that real-time digital counterattack strategies on social networking sites represent effective strategies to preserve corporate reputations as perceived by customers.

The 2012 killing of Chinese citizens in Rome and the ambivalence of Italian journalism

ABSTRACTSredanovic discusses the killing of a father and daughter of Chinese origin in Rome in January 2012, and the portrayal of the case in Italian print journalism. He uses a qualitative analysis of a corpus of 193 articles from seven Italian newspapers with different political, market and geographic profiles. The frequency of generally negative and stereotypical portraits of migrants in crime news is well known; however, this specific case offers a number of less familiar insights. Sredanovic shows the multiple and changing frames and themes, both positive and negative, deployed to portray the event across the two-week period in which it was featured on the front pages of newspapers. He demonstrates in particular the ways in which stereotypes that are often used against migrants in crime news find place even in a case in which the migrants were the victims of the crime. He further illustrate how the representation of the perpetrators shifted from describing them as an exception (when it was thought they were autochthonous) to generalizing about their deviance when it was discovered that they were of Moroccan origin. Sredanovic locates this discussion in an anti-groupist theoretical frame, arguing that the stereotypes used cannot be adequately explained by majority-minority group interactions, and that the delimitation and definition of groups should be understood as ideological from the start. He also argues that aspects of the production routines of crime journalism can be added to the factors that explain the portrayal of the event. He concludes by arguing that Sinophobia is a form of prejudice that varies geographically and in time, and calling for non-reifying, practice-informed analyses that mix discriminating and non-discriminating discourses.

Can Youth with a Migrant Background Speak? Representation, Citizenship and Voice in Italian TV and Press Journalism

Through two case studies on TV and press journalism in Italy in 2012 we explore the representation of youth with a migrant background and of the jus soli issue in the country. We show that, in 2012, thanks also to the debate on jus soli, youth with a migrant background has found a greater representation than in the past in some Italian journalism, especially in State television newscasts and centre and left-wing newspapers. However, in most cases, this coverage presents young people of migrant background either as fundamentally different from or as completely identical to autochthonous youth. Moreover, the young are presented almost always in their individual, biographic dimensions, and the voice on specific political issues remains the monopoly of the autochthonous.