On 21 June 2017 Jeff Bezos appeared in Turin and it was truly a memorable day. Actually, it wasn’t just him: there were directors of many Italian and international newspapers to celebrate (with a few months of delay) the first 150 years of the Press. Scenario, the historic Sala delle Reel, where the paper newspaper comes to life, a symbolically strong choice given that even then the digital had inexorably taken over. Theme: “The Future of Newspapers”, here too, note the choice of words: “newspapers”, literally “newspapers” but paper newspapers; therefore not the future of news or journalism, but of newspapers, including paper, grappling with this digital revolution that has blown up economic accounts, centrality, relationship with readers and which has made many journalists suddenly feel old in evident difficulty with languages of the new platforms.
And so that 21 June was an unforgettable day, for those who were there and for those who continue to think that journalism has a great future, with or without paper. Bezos was there not as the founder and CEO of Amazon, but as the owner of the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 with about $ 250 million out of his own pocket, and evidently successfully relaunched. Of that event, which ended with a dinner which was also attended by the Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, I went to reread the fundamental sentences – annotated by Primaonline – of some of the protagonists to understand if, in addition to applause, it helped us to take the right course.
1) “Technology will not replace reporters, but reporters need to learn how to use it better,” he said Bobby Ghosh, editor of the ‘Hindustan Times’. We are doing it?
2) For the future, according to the CEO of the ‘New York Times’, Mark Thompson, “We need to invest more than cut, to produce quality content by attracting readers and subscribers”. I repeat: are we doing it? Investing more than cutting?
3) The “exclusive content”, he recalled Louis Dreyfus, CEO of ‘Le Monde’, “serve to attract readers and subscribers. Now we have to understand how to retain them, making them feel part of a community “. Are we focusing on exclusive content or are we still lost in the hellish circles of clickbaiting?
4) According to the founder of Politico, Robert Allbritton, “In the future we will have to try to predict the needs of our readers, even before they express them”. I spare myself the question.
Then I tracked down a few tweets, because I remembered being struck by other interventions that obviously hadn’t made the news (for example, I was struck by the The Information project, told by the founder Jessica Lessin: from the following day I am a faithful subscriber). And so I fished out the former editor of the Huffington Post, Lydia Polgreen, who said, “We should care less about formats and more about gaining the trust of our readers.”
The event was opened by the then director of the Press Maurizio Molinari who had urged everyone “to embrace change. The highlight was the final panel (video here), moderated by Massimo Russo, from John Elkann, then only publisher of La Stampa and today also of Repubblica and of all the GEDI newspapers, with Bezos himself. Bezos was brilliant and said a lot of interesting things that many summarized in the maxim: “You can’t fight the future. Be riveting, be right & ask people to pay. They will pay”. Which can be translated: “You cannot fight the future. Be exciting. Be true. And ask people to pay to read you. They will do it ”.
And we, are we doing it?
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