Stefano Feltri blows Carlo De Benedetti (who sawed him as director of Domani newspaper)

8 April 20231 year ago babelfish

“I made an independent newspaper, maybe too much”. What Stefano Feltri wrote after being replaced at the direction of the newspaper Domani by the will of the publisher Carlo De Benedetti.

When Tomorrow was born, in 2020, we all made the bet that there was a space for newspapers. Maybe not huge, but relevant.

After three years and that experience is over, at least for me, I can confirm that there is a space indeed: because in recent years Domani has been much more than a container for articles.

We focused on two things: producing original information, which no one had and which many preferred to avoid being released, and putting together analyses, opinions and ideas that would allow us to tackle complexity.

Journalism, understood as the generation of content and not as the sharing of already public news, is a public good: the market does not produce enough of it, because it costs a lot but returns are limited, because just an exclusive piece of news, a scoop, an inquiry or even a controversy enters the network, immediately becomes anyone who wants to relaunch it.

And the returns on investment – that is, the benefits against which production costs have been sustained – go to almost everyone.

For this reason, among the many reasons, it is so difficult to achieve an economic equilibrium which, during its management, Domani had not (yet) achieved.

So what is a newspaper for?

In light of the many reactions I've received over the past two days to the company's decision to replace me as director, it seems increasingly clear to me.

I say it with the words of Giorgio Gaber, he spoke of communism, but for a strange semantic shift those expectations, hopes and desires also apply to the journalism that we tried to practice in Domani.

Someone was a journalist, I would say using Gaber, because he was "more than himself: he was like two people in one".

“On the one hand, the personal daily effort

And on the other, the sense of belonging to a race that wanted to take flight

To really change your life"

With Domani we have all been more than a set of individuals, a network of intelligences, skills and hopes that made us glimpse a different way of setting up the public debate and, therefore, the country.

I don't think the incredible affection of these hours goes to me as a person – many hardly know me – but to this idea of journalism and participation which, together with dozens of journalists and hundreds of collaborators, I have tried to practice in these three years.

Thanks to the resources provided by the publisher we have been able to produce original investigative journalism (I have to say the thing I am most proud of is the investigation into abuses in the Church, edited by Federica Tourn under the supervision of Giorgio Meletti and with donations from hundreds of readers).

Thanks to the participation of many and many, we have created a brain and perhaps a collective heart that has begun to think and beat more and more strongly.

This journey is now over , not because of my decision , I wish all the best to those who stay and to those who will continue to commit themselves.

Regardless of the conclusion, these three years leave me with a good dose of hope and confidence.

I made an independent newspaper, maybe too much, and many have shown that they were just waiting for a breath of fresh air to show that this country can be better than it often seems to us.

This is all I have to say about the story, now a few days off for Easter and then we start again, in forms and ways to be defined, perhaps here, perhaps elsewhere.

Happy Easter and, as they say in the Scouts, good luck to those who believed in my and our Tomorrow .

Stephen Feltri

(Excerpt from a post by Stefano Feltri on his blog ; here the complete version of the post )

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START MAGAZINE'S INSIGHTS ON THE EVERYDAY TOMORROW CASE:

Why De Benedetti scrapped Feltri and appointed Fittipaldi to the editorship of the daily Domani

Will Marco Damilano be the perfect Benedictine director of Tomorrow with Fittipaldi?

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/stefano-feltri-sfancula-carlo-de-benedetti-che-lo-ha-segato-da-direttore-di-domani-quotidiano/ on Sat, 08 Apr 2023 08:08:28 +0000.