Visit to La Repubblica
by Victoria Bails
La Repubblica is one of the most circulated newspapers in Rome, yet even it needed a TV studio to diversify itself to attract a wider audience.
La Repubblica was founded in 1976 by Eugenio Scalfari, a director of a weekly magazine, and Barbara Spinelli, an Italian politician, as the first Italian tabloid. Now, the paper pushes itself with more social media content and a special digital lab for its traditional journalistic work as a way to stay current and important.
In this studio, our host, Raffaella Menichini, deputy editor and web app representative, explained that a live show takes place in that studio every Tuesday, where the hosts discuss music, present the paper’s web series and offer informational news to appeal to a younger audience.
“We’re trying to find revenues somewhere else,” Menichini said.
Diversification is needed as the outlet’s circulation has been reduced from half a million to 200,000 in the past few years.
Sara Bertuccioli, digital manager, spends lots of her time diversifying even more through social media. Her team helps push three stories a day on Instagram to make 2 million impressions. La Repubblica hosts national contests for followers to possibly have their own photography published on the page as a way to bring more people to the site.
Just a year ago, the publication tried its hand at Instagram stories. Now, it has it down to a system. The social media team has established a specific format for anything from soft news to hard news to make sure the tone is correct for those watching. La Repubblica’s Instagram stories average around 15,000 views. The team has realized that soft news shows the best performance on this platform.
Much like the multiplatform journalistic trend we’ve seen in the United States, La Repubblica is working on training its journalists on how to incorporate data journalism and social media into their daily use.
One very impressive tool they have been working on has been interactive web pages for more innovative ways to tell stories, especially with data journalism. Natalie Rose, manager of the Digital Lab, has been spearheading many projects for the publication.
A huge epidemic in Italy right now is the gambling addictions many Italians face. With this problem comes a lot of heavy data. To try to make it understandable, La Repubblica and Rose teamed up to make an interactive website to see the condition of each city and compare it to others.
Titled “L’Italia Delle Slot,” this interactive page explains how much money is spent per capita. As someone who was unfamiliar with the problem, this website made it much easier to put into perspective how bad the problem truly is in Italy, Rose explained. One interesting fact: It also revealed that tourists contributed heavily to one small city’s astonishing gambling statistics, more so than its residents.
Efforts such as this one have made it easier for its journalists to organize tough information into readable web pages, including their work on The Daphne Project, of which La Repubblica is one of the participants, and for the Union of Rights.
After learning about these innovative aspects of the newspaper, our class was given a tour of the facility to see different parts of the newspaper’s operations.