We invite you to check out the full festival programme on the website, but to provide a taster we have prepared the following brief overview. By clicking on +info► you can link to full details of each session, and then add it if you wish to your personal festival day-by-day agenda on your computer or smartphone.
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09:30 – 10:30 > Teatro della Sapienza | tech-socialmedia
Maybe Facebook doesn’t love us after all. So, what now? +info►
It does appear that Facebook has fallen completely out of love with the news business. Is it us? Is it them? Is it something we said? Does it matter? This panel will explore our troubled romance with the world’s biggest social media platform. We’ll explore what publishers can and should be thinking about now and in the future. Is this little breakup possibly even a good thing? Will a little alone time be good for everyone?
09:30 – 10:45 > Sala San Francesco | community-trust
Finding common ground through community-minded journalism +info►
Communities across the globe are becoming increasingly divided across political and ideological lines. This polarization is partially related to the normalcy of getting one’s news from friends and family exclusively. Here are three projects addressing this challenge: Community Stories Lab’s “Community Storytellers”; Zeit Online’s “Germany Talks”; and Capital Public Radio’s “Place and Privilege Story Circles” organizes “Story Circles”.
09:30 – 10:30 > Sala del Dottorato | panel-discussion
Going digital: a roadmap for organisational transformation +info►
“Legacy media need to put as much emphasis on transforming their organisations as they do transforming their content” – this is the premise underlying Lucy Kueng’s research report Going Digital. A Roadmap for Organisational Transformation. How are media firms approaching the challenges of increasing agility, merging the cultures of journalism and tech, and handling the ceaseless stream of ‘shiny new things’? When should they learn from Silicon Valley, and when should they turn away? These are some of the issues in Lucy’s Kueng’s report which is based on deep research at multiple companies including The Washington Post, Axel Springer, Schibsted, Vox, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Economist, Le Monde, El Pais, CNN and The Guardian. In this panel Lucy Kueng and two of her interviewees will offer their first hand insights on best practice in organisational transformation, covering themes such as agility, strategy, the blending of tech, data and journalism with a view to establishing a roadmap for change in the face of digital disruption.
09:30 – 10:30 > Hotel Brufani – Sala Priori | presentations
NowThis @Newsroom: when social reporting and field reporting join forces +info►
In October 2017, social video news provider NowThis launched @newsroom, a Twitter account intended to combine the best of the company’s real-world and social reporting. The launch coincided with a major court ruling in the US city of St. Louis, where a police officer was found not guilty of murdering an African American man despite evidence to the contrary. NowThis sent three field teams of video journalists to St. Louis and coordinated their reporting activities publicly through the @newsroom Twitter account. This allowed the public to experience what it’s like for a newsroom to report a major story on the ground as it happens, while simultaneously allowing the NowThis newsroom to keep a birds-eye view of what was happening via social media. In this presentation, Kim Bui and Andy Carvin of NowThis will explain how they’ve built a real-time newsroom within an organization and share lessons learned from that process and from building a similar newsroom with Reported.ly.
09:30 – 10:45 > Centro Servizi G. Alessi | presentations
Lightning talks by RISJ fellows on their research +info►
Visiting fellows from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (University of Oxford) present their research, including investigative journalism in Southern Africa, visual storytelling on mobile, data journalism in small newsrooms, environmental journalism and more. The journalists are turned into short-time-academics for three to nine months and come from around the world (from Botswana to Finland to Hong Kong). Each Lightning Talk will consist of a 5-minute presentations, in which the researcher will use 20 slides, which auto-advance every 15 seconds.
09:30 – 10:45 > Sala della Vaccara | panel-discussion
How can politics support investigative and quality journalism? +info►
A free, diverse and responsible press is a core element of any functioning democracy. But covering a potentially interesting story is risky and costly, both for the media organisation and often for the journalists themselves. Even in democratic societies, the personal risks can be very high. We want to debate the state of media freedom in Europe and its importance for democracy, with a particular focus on the financing of investigative journalism. The Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament has recently commissioned a study from experts at the University of Hamburg who are working on a research report to review the different models of financing investigative journalism. These models range along a continuum from receiving government funds to private funds and are evaluated using a set of criteria including independence, quality, market structure, production processes, sustainability and competitiveness. This study will be presented and discussed during this session.
09:30 – 10:45 > Hotel Brufani – Sala Raffaello | panel-discussion
Funders confidential. Leading donors open up on their decision processes to reveal who they fund and why +info►
How do some of the world’s most prominent foundations focused on supporting media and journalism make their decisions on who or what to fund? What do they really look for? Which ideas energise them and which don’t convince them? Why do they say no to your proposal?
09:45 – 10:45 > Sala delle Colonne, Palazzo Graziani | workshop
investigating the Internet: using data from social media, analytics, and the web to find and tell stories +info►
Investigating the Internet: using data from social media, analytics, and the web to find and tell stories. It’s essential that journalists on every beat understand how to gather and analyze information related to social media, web analytics and advertising, and websites. This workshop uses case studies of BuzzFeed News investigations into misinformation and ad fraud, as well as tips and tutorials, to equip journalists with the basic skills they need to incorporate this data into their work. No technical knowledge or expertise is required.
10:30 – 11:45 > Sala dei Notari | tech-socialmedia
Moral panic over technology: is it all that bad? +info►
Media commentators are calling for technology companies to be nationalized, boycotted, and even shut down, claiming they are the ruination of society. Really? Are we worse off or better off with the net? Are we heading into a great decline or are media overreacting? What are the risks of overreaction in enabling regulation and control? What are the risks of bad governance on behalf of the technology companies?
10:45 – 12:00 > Palazzo Sorbello | panel-discussion
Social theory and the news +info►
The journalism/academic divide in the post-truth era. The session will focus on the ongoing challenges for researchers to make their work relevant to both journalists and the academy, and the frustration scholars can feel watching journalists repeat problematic practices and patterns that have been well documented by academic research – especially in the Trump/Brexit moment, when the stakes are so high. But at the same time, a number of academically-based centers (Reuters, Tow, etc) attempt to straddle the academic/professional divide and create better conversation among researchers and journalists. How can these and other research efforts make a difference in how journalism is produced?
10:45 – 12:00 > Sala delle Colonne, Palazzo Graziani | tech-socialmedia
Automating verification? The role of technology in the verification process: status, activities and challenges +info►
The session will investigate and outline how and to what extent technology (such as tools, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning) can support journalists, fact-checkers and those investigating human rights abuses. What are current practices? Which challenges and roadblocks exist? What is the role of humans in the fact-checking process, and how has it changed? What lies ahead and can be expected? These are just some of the issues that will be raised in the session. It brings together experts from various fields. They approach the topic of content verification from different angles, and share their views and experiences with the audience. Attendees are also invited to participate in and contribute to the discussions.
10:45 – 12:00 > Sala della Vaccara | humanitarian-crises
The emotional toll on journalists covering the refugee crisis +info►
How moral injury has emerged as the new terrain for media and mental health. INSI’s ground-breaking research project published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism studied the coverage of the refugee crisis as it peaked on Europe’s shores and found that ‘moral injury’ not PTSD was the biggest issue facing journalists. This is the first time this issue has been studied outside the military, where if not treated correctly can cause veterans issues with reintegrating after deployments. Those journalists who were local, parents, working alone and who felt their work loads had increased were more at risk of developing moral injury (an injury to an individual’s moral conscience resulting from an act of perceived moral transgression which produces profound emotional shame). Those who helped refugees were even more likely to experience the feelings of guilt and shame that go along with moral injury. In this session, we will hear from journalists who covered the crisis about how they managed the difficulties of a story that often seemed to demand they got involved, how they were affected, and we will talk about industry-wide conversations we were able to lead that are now supporting individuals and institutions, and what news organisations can do to mitigate the risk of moral injury and prevent it from deteriorating into a mental health condition.
10:45 – 12:00 > Hotel Brufani – Sala Raffaello | ustoo
#UsToo: sexual harassment, gendered threats and press freedom +info►
Organised in association with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
11:45 – 13:15 > Sala del Dottorato | data-journalism-school
International data journalism unconference +info►
What are the challenges in the world of data journalism today? What’s already in place to try and overcome them? What new ways, solutions, collaborations could we come up with to further solve the problems faced by many data journalists, news developers, and editors in 2018? We are gathering four international experts to tackle this topic, in this highly engaging session where the audience takes part in the discussion: Eva Constantaras (data journalist, Greece), Duncan Clark (co-founder of Kiln, UK), Pinar Dag (Kadir Has University, Turkey), Syed Nazakat (founder of DataLEADs, India), moderated by Marianne Bouchart (Data Journalism Awards manager, France). Each speaker will pitch a specific mini-discussion each on a challenge of their choice (tackling subjects such as data visualisation, international collaborations, or the state of data journalism in developing countries). The goal is for us to discuss challenges in the world of data journalism today, not just in Europe or the US, but also in other regions of the world. Participants will get to hear about all four group discussions first, before they pick which one they want to take part in. We’ll then divide the room in four and get going! As a participant, you’ll get to speak, exchange ideas with everyone on the topic you choose. At the end of the “unconference” session, we will all gather to try and formulate ways we could overcome those challenges. The outcome of this session will take the shape of a series of collaborative articles to be published shortly after the festival on Medium. Note that this session will look nothing like your typical panel discussion. We call it an “unconference” because it will use the same principles and structure: the audience is as involved in the session as the speakers. We will start from four themes, and you will decide of the outcome.
12:00 – 13:00 > Hotel Brufani – Sala Raffaello | workshop
Masterclass in Google Maps +info►
From a breaking news situation to a feature length article – learn how Google Maps and Earth images can compliment your social media posts or add a visual element to you print and online articles. We’ll dive into storytelling with maps, showcase examples with StreetView images and point towards Storyspheres – where audio brings panoramic images to life.
12:00 – 13:00 > Teatro della Sapienza | panel-discussion
Al-Sisi’s Egypt: elections, repression, the Giulio Regeni case +info►
Egypt, where President Al-Sisi has recently been re-elected with 97 percent of the votes, is a country where human rights violations – even forced disappearances, torture, executions – are multiplying. The horrific 2017 torture and murder of the Italian Cambridge University PhD student Giulio Regeni allowed those who have been fighting for the human rights in the country to bring international attention to the deteriorating situation. Press freedom too is increasingly at risk.
12:00 – 13:00 > Sala dei Notari | ijf18talks
Optimizing journalism for trust. #ijf18talk by Jay Rosen +info►
#ijf18talk by Jay Rosen. Moderated by Mathew Ingram. We are still in the early days of the wake-up call for news publishers as they discover that the digital ad business will never be a reliable means of support. Meanwhile, all of journalism is grappling with problems of trust amid extreme polarization and the dominance of a tech industry that seems indifferent to the fate of a free press. Subscription is appealing to more and more publishers as an escape route from this troubled landscape. It would provide a revenue stream to replace ads and a more controlled publishing climate to combat trolls. If you have subscribers (and their credit card numbers) you don’t have to care as much about Facebook’s shifting algorithms. But the cost is high. Digital paywalls prevent journalism from seeking its natural public, and limit the spread of the best work. It’s hard to be a public service when you only speak to the portion of the audience that knows the product and is willing to pay for regular access. This is the problem that the Membership Puzzle Project is trying to solve. (I am the project’s director.) We focus on membership models in news because they do not require a digital paywall. Members regularly tell us they want the work they’re supporting to spread as widely as possible. On the other hand, membership does require a tighter bond with supporters, greater transparency, more interaction, and a conscious decision to optimize a news organization for trust. What that phrase “optimize for trust” means in practice: this talk will be about that.
14:00 – 15:00 > Palazzo Sorbello | disinformation
Fake news: you’re making it worse +info►
Are all of our efforts to beat fake news creating worse problems than we are supposedly solving? Will any of the approaches even work? In this talk, Shane Greenup will argue that all of the popular solutions being pursued are at best, band aid fixes, or at worst, incredibly counter-productive and dangerous to society. Fortunately though, by taking the best aspects of each approach it may be possible to construct a solution which works at the correct scale (global), acts on the right targets (the people, not the content), and ultimately gives us a society more resistant to fake news than ever before.
14:00 – 15:15 > Centro Servizi G. Alessi | media-under-attack
Survival mechanisms for Middle East journalists +info►
In Egypt, Syria, Libya and Tunisia, it has become very challenging to be a journalist. Doing your basic job is marred with daily risks. Following the Arab spring and the unprecedented hopes for freedom of expression, it is so difficult to go back to hiding behind walls again. We as journalists have developed coping techniques to protect ourselves from jail and cover our stories with unprecedented creativity and skills of writing without getting caught.
14:00 – 15:00 > Sala San Francesco | community-trust
When journalism goes live and on stage: can live events help build loyalty, trust – and the business? +info►
Even though journalism remains the core product of most news media – and certainly of all the media featured on this panel – a growing number of publishers are also producing live events. These can vary from one-off shows like le Monde’s Live Magazine, to regular reader events, like the Financial Times’ FT Engage series, to membership models featuring events, like Danish news startup Zetland. In this panel, we’ll discuss why more and more media are choosing to produce events, what their relationship is to a publisher’s greater goals, how it affects the relationship to readers – but also how it affects the newsroom, the journalists, and even the journalism itself.
14:00 – 15:00 > Teatro della Sapienza | in-conversation
Basic income. Time for a radical rethink of work, well-being, citizenship +info►
Can we create a fairer society by providing a guaranteed income for all citizens? What would this mean for our health, wealth and well-being? Basic income is rooted in the idea that all citizens have a role in generating the wealth currently enjoyed only by a few. Faced with the increasing precariousness in all areas of work, an emerging disaffected mass class and signals of political instability, basic income is an issue around which to build new progressive policies, to redefine citizens’ relationship with work and the community in which they live. Guy Standing, an economist who has been for many years a leading figure worldwide in research into basic income, will illustrate what we can learn from the pilot projects on basic income undertaken in various parts of the world, what the effects are on the economy, on poverty and on work, and why many of the arguments against basic income can be overcome.
15:15 – 16:15 > Palazzo Sorbello | workshop
Fighting back: how should journalists respond against attacks online? +info►
How can journalists and news organizations fight back against organized or state-instigated attacks? This workshop focuses on practical defenses against harassment and intimidation in the digital and social media space. When a social media campaign urges the gang rape of a female reporter, or when the state orchestrates a campaign of networked disinformation against a news organization, what can journalists do?
15:15 – 16:15 > Sala dei Notari | in-conversation
Google News Initiative: a conversation about news with Madhav Chinnappa +info►
In March, Google launched the Google News Initiative (GNI), their effort to help journalism thrive in the digital age. The GNI signifies a major milestone in Google’s 15-year commitment to the news industry — across products, partnerships, and programs. Learn more about the GNI and how Google is working with journalists across Europe.
15:15 – 16:30 > Sala del Dottorato | panel-discussion
How smartphones are making journalism fairer +info►
Smartphones are powerful tools for creating audio-visual stories that are optimised for online and social media. But they are also unique tools for tackling prejudices within newsrooms that can hold some journalists back from achieving their full potential, and for building engagement and dialogue with non-traditional audiences. This session will explore how smartphones improve inclusiveness in newsrooms for women, older journalists, ethnic minority journalists, and vulnerable contributors including migrants, people living with disabilities, and children.
16:30 – 17:45 > Teatro della Sapienza | community-trust
A deeper definition of community: it’s more than just conversation +info►
Facebook said it is shifting to enabling “meaningful interaction between people.” Media companies emphasize conversation as the goal of community? Is that the right definition of community? Let’s help both platforms and media companies see deeper definitions of community built around convening communities not only to dialogue but also to understanding and action.
16:30 – 17:45 > Sala dei Notari | media-under-attack
Investigating links between governments and organised crime: the murders of Daphne Caruana Galizia and Ján Kuciak +info►
The recent murders of two European investigative journalists have shaken international public opinion. Daphne Caruana Galicia, one of the best known Maltese investigative journalists, was killed on 16 October 2017 by a car bomb. She was the first journalist to reveal the involvement of Maltese government politicians in the Panama Papers, and had also unveiled the involvement of the Maltese Prime Minister’s wife in the Panamanian offshore company Egrant Inc, focusing the attention on the money received from the company and the subsequent agreements of the Maltese government with that of Azerbaijan in the energy field. A mafia-style execution killed Ján Kuciak on 22 February 2018, together with his girlfriend. Kuciak, a Slovenian journalist, had investigated tax evasion cases that also involved members of the ruling party, and already in October 2017 had reported intimidating phone calls. He had been working on an important investigation into the collusion between politicians and the ‘Ndrangheta, and on the infiltration of organized crime into the economy of the country. On 28 February the Slovenian website Aktuality.sk published the last article by Kuciak, after which the Secretary of the National Security Council, the assistant of Prime Minister Robert Fico and the Minister of Culture all resigned. At the end of March 2018, the Prime Minister himself, under pressure from the political crisis following the assassination of Kuciak, resigned. The deaths of Daphne Caruana Galicia and Ján Kuciak demonstrate with shocking immediacy the risk for journalists who investigate corruption and the links between organised crime and governments. The deaths remind us that the safety of journalists is an issue that should never be downplayed, and that there are no safe countries. Corinne Vella, the sister of Daphne Caruana Galizia, will be one of the speakers.
16:30 – 17:45 > Palazzo Sorbello | panel-discussion
Fascism is back. Is journalism part of the problem or of a solution? +info►
Populism, the alt-right, extremisms of all sorts seem unstoppable. Europe, the cradle of democracy but of fascism too, just saw the first far-right government in which the heirs of Nazism hold a strong position. Hungary and Poland could hardly be seen anymore as democratic countries. The right-wingers are riding on antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-migration, hate of anyone and anything which is not modelled after themselves. European institutions are taken aback, intellectuals are still thinking, while civil society is reacting only sporadically and not loudly enough. Is the media ready to step in and fight for democratic values of equality, inclusion and respect of basic human rights?
17:30 – 18:45 > Sala San Francesco | disinformation
Critical perspectives on the disinformation discussion +info►
What do we know about disinformation and what can be done about it? Are proposed cures sometimes worse than the actual diseases at hand? Or are we critically underestimating the scale of the problem and missing opportunities to effectively address it? On this panel, we take stock of the basic features of the disinformation debate and discuss what fact-checkers, researchers, civil society organizations and other independent parties can do to address the problems at hand, including a range of different perspectives from journalists, academics, and individuals involved in recent policy discussions in Europe.
17:45 – 19:00 > Sala delle Colonne, Palazzo Graziani | panel-discussion
States, companies, algorithms and crowds: the many new faces of web censorship +info►
Censorship is one of the most mainstreamed tools for repression in the digital age. Sometimes it is abuses of copyright regulation, sometimes just a tool for expression control, sometimes the collaborative effect of a crowd that abuses the blurred definition of hate speech. The panel will consider the diverse faces of censorship; 1. by using social and political pressures, the content takedown achieved by pressuring a platform or in collaboration with an ISP 2. algorithmic censorship, or the abuse of the daily confusion to make polarizing material less visible on the many platforms in which algorithms decide what you see and what you don’t This diversity of cases pose different threats. We will reflect on the countermeasures, their accessibility, and other challenges in this digital conflict.
17:45 – 18:45 > Sala del Dottorato | in-conversation
Taking the red pill: has journalism become part of the problem? +info►
In conversation witb Joris Luyendijk. Moderated by Sameer Padania.
17:45 – 19:00 > Hotel Brufani – Sala Raffaello | media-under-attack
Journalism’s perfect storm? Confronting rising global threats from “f*ke news” to censorship, surveillance, and the killing of journalists with impunity +info►
Some hail this period in journalism as a Golden Era, pointing to major global collaborative journalism projects and the biggest data dumps in history. True, large scale investigative journalism is ‘on fire’. But journalism and its democratic functions are increasingly ‘under fire’ globally. The killing of journalists with impunity, the indiscriminate jailing of media workers and bloggers, internet shutdowns, the ‘f*ke news’ crisis, mass surveillance and targeted interception, the platforms strangling digital profitability, erosion of trust in news, State-sponsored harassment of journalists, continuing mass layoffs in traditional newsrooms… these threats to journalism are converging to create what could be described as journalism’s ‘perfect storm’. This panel of international experts and leading editors will analyse the implications of these threats and consider ways to collaborate on the ‘fightback’.
21:00 – 22:30 > Sala dei Notari | documentaries
Daphne. Who was Daphne Caruana Galizia and why was she murdered? +info►
First screening of the documentary Daphne (in English with subtitles in Italian). 16 October 2017: a car bomb killed investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, extinguishing the voice that for years, practically alone, held power to account on the island by looking into the compromise of politics, its conflicts of interest, its corruption. Through testimonies and documents, this docu-film reveals who Daphne was, who might have wanted her dead, who was afraid of her voice, and investigates the motives behind a political murder whose instigators are still in the shadows. Organised by La Repubblica and 42° Parallelo.
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