by Antonio Rossano

“My day is spent flitting between hundreds of sites and blogs, books to read, articles to edit and conversations on Skype with universities and research centres overseas…” That’s the opening of our chat with Serena Danna, 31, editor of the New Languages section of “Reading”, the Sunday appointment with Corriere della Sera, which Serena defines as “the finest culture supplement in the world”.
At the daily paper il Manifesto in 2003, for which she also wrote from Lisbon and London, the city in which she studied as an undergraduate, in 2007 she was hired by Il Sole 24 Ore, where she worked for 3 and a half years, until she moved to Corriere della Sera. She has written a book of interviews for Einaudi, “Mafia Internal Product”, an adventure for Serena that was “very difficult and thrilling”. In the summer of 2012 she was visiting editor at the Guardian for three weeks while this summer she worked as the New York correspondent of Corriere della Sera.

At “Reading” you deal with New Languages, or?

“Or everything to do with digital culture. Reading was born with the ambition and the objective of trying to talk about technology by liberating it from the narrow confines of services and products, trying to give technology the rightful place that it should have, in other words its cultural place: this is one of the reasons why digital culture is one of the cornerstones of “Reading”. And it is also one of the topics that gives us greatest satisfaction and we are, I believe, also the first and only culture section that has decided to invest in a sector like that.”

In your analysis, there is often an awareness of the presence, on the net, of a models of communication that are outdated, that find it hard to adapt to the medium, like when in the “Corriere“ on 6th March you wrote a post on the M5S (5 Star Movement).
“The Movement communicates on the Internet through a blog and a site that’s 12 years old, but it avoids the types of interaction described as “web 2.0”.
“In my opinion the problem is that we are still at the beginning of a revolution that is definitely fascinating but is also very hard because we are in a phase of total transition and so we still can’t manage to free ourselves from the so-called “old”, which prevents us from moving on, without any baggage, towards the “new”. I also like to emphasise that it isn’t necessary, however, to be champions of a radical pursuit of the new: there are, for journalism in particular, a lot of things to save from the past. Because it is true that new technologies offer us a number of opportunities and possibilities for the profession but after that the values and contents of it are still the same as they were ten or a hundred years ago. We are in a period in which the old and the new continue to live together but not in the harmony that I hope they will manage to achieve in a few years. Not, as still often happens now, unfortunately, by sharing the more negative sides.”

Newspapers are in crisis. A crisis that is endemic nowadays and that was born shortly after the advent of the Internet. It has been said, by many, that “newspapers are in crisis, journalism has never been healthier…”

“It’s clear that one journalistic model is in crisis, not “journalism” itself. If there has ever been a comparable period, in terms of the wealth of opportunities and possibilities, I think it might be the invention of printing and Gutenberg’s movable type. What is in crisis is a model of economic sustainability, and of the organisation of work, which is now disintegrating as it is not capable of tackling the changes the period requires.”

With digital, new “forms” of contents have been born: native advertising, brand journalism, entrepreneurial journalism, these are some of the labels that identify it. How is journalism changing and what problems might arise?

“Native advertising is clearly a type of content that has something to do with advertising. The mastheads that have launched and are experimenting with these new routes, such as BuzzFeed, The Verge, but also the Wall Street Journal seems to me to be tackling this type of content, I don’t think they are so far from our public relations departments that often cause bellyache in “traditional” newsrooms. If you are honest with the reader about what he or she is reading, everything’s OK. The most important thing is not to make the reader believe that you are producing journalism when you aren’t, when you are discussing a product, you are telling a story with relation to a brand, a product, a label. This is communication, information, if you want, but it isn’t journalism. A newspaper can be made up of a lot of contents and a piece that comes from a brand or an advertisement can sit very well side by side with an investigative report in the strict sense, if it’s these particular articles that make it possible for the newspaper to have economic sustainability.

Without money you can’t do investigative reporting…”
Is there a successful business model in journalism?
“I am curious to see what Jeff Bezos will do at the Washington Post, because it there is anyone capable of surprising us in terms of a possible business model it’s him. It’s clear that newspapers can no longer be as we have known them up to now in terms of numbers, sizes, contents produced. Advertising certainly cannot be “the” business model.”