A snoozed alarm woke me up for my daily breakfast. Of course, after breakfast, I got ready for our first media visit at Art Attack.
We all gathered in the lobby at 9:40 and Matteo walked us to around where we had our group dinner the first night. We approached a door that looked like it had nothing special inside, but I was very mistaken. Through the doors were 45 people who worked for Art Attack, an advertising agency, and they all seemed to be so passionate about their jobs. We heard from both sides of the brain today: the right who gave us the technical side of the business and the left who gave us the the creative process. After a small mishap with a painting halfway through the presentation (whoops!), we watched case studies that the company worked on in the past. It was quite refreshing to see the work they were doing as well as how passionate they were about it.
Kelsey and I grabbed a quick lunch after finishing at Art Attack at a place called Donkey Punch. All of the sandwiches were named after popular American rock bands and artists. We turned around and, wouldn’t you know it, there was a Terrible Towel hung up right above the door (close to a small patriots flag, but we all know who the better team is).
Our lunch was followed by a bus ride to La Reppublica. There, we heard about their social media pages and their data journalism. Of course, I’ve seen a trend in publications using social media, but I really appreciated how La Repubblica used their Instagram page. It was very clean and useful to their users as a way to get the news that is produced. All of the data journalism that was shown to us was extremely creative and engaging. I enjoyed hearing the work it takes to create something like that because I’ve always wanted to know myself. Interactive pages are an extremely great way to keep readers engaged as attention spans shrink. La Reppublica has been doing great work in both aspects. After the presentation, Raffaella showed us around the facility, which was beautiful and felt like a great environment to work in.
We took the bus back to the hotel and had a group meeting to talk about our favorite aspects of the trip so far as well as the plans for the next few days. Robin, Helen, Kelsey and I planned on going to the Pittsburgh bar we heard about in Rome. At 7, we walked to go get bus tickets and take transportation there. As soon as we approached our stop on the tram, it instantly started pouring. We braved the rain and finally reached the bar after a few stops along the way to keep track of where we were going. We were welcomed by Giovanni, the owner of the bar, as he saw our Pittsburgh gear on. Another group of Point Park students came to the bar as we were there and sat with us. We all left to go get dinner after a round, and at this point, it had stopped raining. Dinner was absolutely delicious (I never want American meatballs ever again!). We took the tram back home after dinner to prepare for another long day ahead of us.
