5 May 2012 – The International Journalism Festival is held annually in Perugia, Italy which is about 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) from Rome.   This is our third year attending and the event never disappoints. 

There were 220 festival events (all are free entry) plus some 50 festival workshops that required registration.  And not all were in Italian.  But if you speak Italian (ahem) you have more fun.  It is spread out over 12 venues but all are a short walking distance of each other.  The presentations are incredibly varied:  “War reporting” (how not to get killed), “Transnational investigative journalism” (cross-border investigations of corruption and crime, which included working with attorneys), “DataCamp 2012″ (which included working with Big Data analytics), “Are lawyers killing investigative journalism?” (the dangers of those men in suits), etc., etc.

The Festival attendees tend to be journalists, media scholars, media agencies and this year more lawyers than usual.   There were some riveting presentations/conversations on the media market and the concentration of power, wealth and resources and the need to bring regulation or antitrust legislation into play.  The ultimate irony:  you bring in regulation to maintain freedom. 

And there was a lot of discussion about “digital dualism”, i.e. the undue separation of the online and offline worlds and activities, how people feel that their lives are more real online than they are in reality, and they feel they have more freedom online than they do off-line.  

Plus some interesting chats were about the magazine industry:  have magazines been getting worse throughout the years?  Today, advertising takes precedence and priority over everything, because the majority of funding for most magazines comes from this source. I’m sure that many editors wouldn’t prefer it to be like this, but that’s just how most magazines have evolved.

But new digital magazines … and there are a crop of them … like PORT and Hypebeast can choose to print whatever they want, and retain complete creative control.  It is the “old” attitude from years gone by:  give a feature the space it needs. Nowadays, publishers don’t allow features to run longer than a certain amount of pages as money could be made selling to advertisers.  If you are an oldster like me you remember that profiles in the Esquires of the 1960s, essays in Playboy by Hunter S.Thompson, that ran to 40 pages.  People say that our attention spans have been reduced by digital media and the internet and that’s why we don’t have such long features anymore, but the truth is that publishers have lost focus on what they are producing.

And then there is the thrust of social media which has increasingly become the main source of news for anyone under the age of 30, coupled with the celebrity presence in all-things-political.  In the U.S., with the presidential race (which just seems to never stop … ever) looming, you have Republicans and Democrats courting Hollywood, not only to win endorsements, but also to glom crucial campaign dollars. 

At its heart?  Content.  Social media provides celebrities with a powerful new ability to reach out to their audience directly, without relying on intermediaries and they can potentially ignore journalists.  But the competitive pressure is great because celebrities – like journalists – must now produce fresh “content” to keep fans.

And there’s the rub.  Consumers … and voters … have been trained to have shorter and shorter attention spans, so there is more onus on journalists and media outlets to “entertain”. Reality television, drama, politics, celebrity and “news” are blending in new ways. Hence Sudan only becomes foreign-policy news when George Clooney stages a protest, and when President Obama gave his White House dinner speech last week, it was placed next to shots of Kardashian’s ball gown on the mainstream internet news sites.

On its final day, the Festival inaugurated a session dedicated to start-ups in digital journalism. The name was “Future12″ and each company had 12 minutes to present, followed by 15 minutes Q&A sessions after every 3 presentations.

Also, there was a panel organized by the European Commission and Associazioni Giornalisti Scuola di Perugia on the difficult relationship between sovra-national and national political bodies in Europe featuring the current Ministry of European Affairs, Enzo Moavero Milanesi.

One of the big elements this year was the “school of data journalism” which was organized in association with the European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and comprised three panels and five workshops which took place during the whole Festival.  One panel had Pulitzer-winning journalists Steve Doig and Sarah Duke discussing how to use news and numbers and data to produce stories, with the Guardian’s Datablog editor Simon Rogers and The New York Times’s editor of interactive news Aaron Pilhofer. 

Here is a video presentation from another panel in the series:

Getting stories from data 

Enormous datasets can often prove extremely daunting to the unfamiliar. Mistakes and crimes have historically benefited from, and triumphs and good decisions been obscured by, a mask of bewildering numbers and statistics and gone unreported. Large datasets often hold a wealth of undiscovered stories for those willing to invest the time into exploring them. This workshop is a ‘spotters’-guide for things to look out for and where to look for datasets.