This article was published on April 2, 2022 on page 8 of number 21 of the Essential. You can subscribe here.
In Savoia di Lucania, a small town in Basilicata, not even the bar in the square has newspapers anymore. To buy a newspaper you have to go to Caggiano, 16 kilometers away. The same happens in dozens of municipalities in the south. And the more you go down, the worse the situation gets.
The issue mainly concerns national newspapers, many of which have renounced distribution in southern Calabria and in the two island regions due to prohibitive costs. This is a structural problem: to ensure timely delivery to newsstands in these areas of the country, newspapers must be printed in local printers, but not many are able to cover the additional costs of printing on the spot with copies. they sell in the region.
And if a high-circulation newspaper like Corriere della Sera can afford to print in six printing plants (in Milan, Rome, Padua, Bari, Catania and Cagliari), for many others it is a loss-making operation. The alternative is to send the copies by air, but even in this case, to recover the expense, you need to sell many copies.
In the last ten years in Calabria 500 newsstands have closed, some national newspapers have cut their circulation, particularly in the province of Reggio Calabria and in the inland countries. Those who arrive are often hours late. Cosenza is an exception, which is still well served. And in any case, the distribution of newspapers that do not print on the spot does not go beyond the Strait of Messina.
The magazines, on the other hand, arrive a day or two after their release date. Copies of Internazionale, for example, which depart from Bergamo where the weekly is printed, arrive at newsstands throughout most of the country on Fridays or Saturdays, depending on the city, and at the beginning of the following week in Sicily and Calabria. L’Essenziale, which is printed like a newspaper in Rome and Milan, arrives everywhere on Saturday morning, except in Sardinia, Sicily and part of Calabria where it arrives the following week.
In Sicily, newspapers such as La Stampa, Domani, il Manifesto and il Riformista do not exist. Il Foglio sends only the weekend issue, while other newspapers, such as Il Messaggero and il Mattino, are released only between July and August to follow their readers on vacation. Some of these newspapers, in the face of protests, have offered digital subscriptions at reduced prices to readers in the areas they have chosen not to arrive.
In the last ten years, the Italian newsstands have decreased considerably. From almost 35 thousand they have been reduced to 22 thousand.
The editors of these newspapers have decided to suspend shipments to Catania and Palermo due to the costs of air transport, the difficulty in arriving on time in most of the island and the newsstand crisis. In Sicily 400 newsstands have closed in 12 years and those who resist do not earn from the sale of newspapers but from scratch cards, stationery and children’s games. “It is no longer convenient for publishers to distribute in Sicily, whoever decides to do so does it at a loss”, says Carmelo Ventura, owner of a Catania distribution agency.
Among the national newspapers, in the newsstands there are only Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, Avvenire, il Fatto newspaper, Libero and la Verità, which print in the only two Sicilian printers, that of the Sud Publishing Company (Ses), owned by publisher of the Gazzetta del Sud Lino Morgante, and of the Sts of Catania. In smaller municipalities or in the hinterland, these newspapers also arrive late, as confirmed by Giovanni Nangano of Aenne Press, another Sicilian distributor: “To get to the seven newsstands scattered throughout the Nebrodi mountains, from Gangi to Petralia Soprana, we spend 120 euros per week transport and, since we earn 5 percent gross on each copy, to break even we would have to sell at least 300 copies a week. We go there only out of a spirit of service “.
Only the local newspaper market is resisting, but it has halved in the last ten years and is divided between the western and eastern sides of the island. In Catania, for example, it is increasingly rare to find copies of the Giornale di Sicilia, which closed the eastern editorial offices in 2019, and the Gazzetta del Sud di Messina.
On the smaller islands it is even worse. In Pantelleria “the newspapers arrive only from July to October, despite the Danish Air Transport, the airline that connects the island to Sicily, has given the willingness to deliver the newspapers for free in the winter months”, says Angelo Fumuso, a former newsagent islander. At the end of November 2020, the last two newspapers distributed on the island, the Giornale di Sicilia and la Repubblica, also surrendered.
Since then, for much of the year, the 8,000 residents have been cut off from the daily news on paper. Assostampa Sicilia has mobilized to bring the newspapers back to the island, but without success. “Information is a right of all Italian citizens and for the inhabitants of Pantelleria, who are already in a situation of geographic marginalization, it is even more so”, wrote vice-president Vito Orlando on the association’s website.
The newspapers do not even reach the seven thousand inhabitants of Lampedusa. When the distribution company announced to newsagents with an email that from 16 September 2021 the newspapers would no longer be delivered to the island, the mayor Salvatore Martello protested for “the unacceptable inequality of treatment with respect to the rights of all citizens. to complete and plural information “. The mayor’s appeal to get the newspapers back – because “not all the citizens of Lampedusa have a smartphone, a computer or a tablet to read online” – did not, however, have any effect.
In Sardinia the situation is similar. Nine national newspapers are printed in the south of the region, two in the north. The magazines arrive by ship in Olbia and from there three distribution agencies load them on their vans and transport them to newsstands. “The local newspapers govern the whole system in these parts,” says Giuseppe Piras, owner of a distribution company with twelve employees that serves 150 newsstands in Sassari, Alghero and a part of the Nuoro area.
It refers to the Unione Sarda, 25 thousand copies sold mainly between Cagliari and Oristano, and to New Sardinia, 19 thousand copies in particular in Sassari, Gallura and Barbagia, which since February has passed from the Gedi group to Sapere Aude Editori (Sae). The two Sardinian printing centers are their property. “No national newspaper can afford it, in order not to go at a loss it should sell over five thousand copies, and in Sicily and Sardinia no one reaches these figures”, explains Marco Melillo of Reds, distributor of the Manifesto, who decided not to go to Sardinia. more.
“There is a lot of talk about the digital divide, but here we are in the presence of a clear cut in culture and information”, says the director of the Manifesto Norma Rangeri. “We tried in every possible way, repeatedly, for two years we decided to distribute the newspaper in Sardinia and Sicily only in the summer, then, while selling a few thousand copies, we were forced to give up because it cost us too much”.
In the last ten years, the Italian newsstands have decreased considerably. There were almost 35 thousand, reduced to 22 thousand, of which just over a thousand are in supermarkets and large-scale distribution. Many of those that survived had to convert. Now they sell everything and newspapers are not the main source of income.
In the center of Cagliari many are closed and in the open ones there are often toys or souvenirs for tourists: cups with the four Moors, magnets, tea towels. The newsstand in front of the city council no longer even has the foreign press. “We had English, French, Spanish and German newspapers, now nothing more”, explains the owner. On the bench facing the sea there are now the cooking magazines and the crossword puzzles, “which are the old ones, because of the truckers’ strike for the expensive bills”.
In Sassari the focus was on the newsstand as a cultural center and neighborhood shop, open seven days a week. “Many have held up, have computerized and offer new services, such as parcel collection”, explains the Piras distributor. In the interior countries, the sale of newspapers has become marginal. In the resale that he has been running for twenty-three years in Armungia – 400 inhabitants, in the southwest of Sardinia – Gigi Prasciolu now sells cigarettes, household goods and has a book shop and a drinks distributor inside. Sells Sardinian newspapers, few national ones. “Almost all of them are in free fall, except the recipe, gossip and puzzle papers. Nobody takes sports anymore, we read online, ”he says. Hence the thought of taking the day off, Sunday: “From fifty copies I have gone down to fifteen, maximum twenty in the summer”.
With the war in Ukraine and increases in gas and electricity, the situation is in danger of precipitating. On March 15, 2022, the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers (Fieg) launched an alarm on the distribution of newspapers in Italy. The cost of paper has risen by 100 percent and, in addition, there are difficulties in finding the raw material, since in Italy paper for newspapers is not produced but it is mostly imported from Scandinavia.
Some newspapers have reduced circulation and foliation, while protests by hauliers against fuel increases prevented delivery for a few days to newsstands in the Olbia area, in Sardinia, and in the Salerno area. “The distribution of the press constitutes the prerequisite for the exercise of two fundamental constitutional rights: the right to inform and the right to be informed”, wrote Fieg in a note.
This article was published on April 2, 2022 on page 8 of number 21 of the Essential. You can subscribe here.