21 takeaways from the Journalism Festival in Perugia
May 5, 2014 (updated on May 8, 2014)
The Perugia Journalism Festival forces you to be selective. At any given time, you miss more sessions than you can attend. So consider this a very subjective list of takeaways I took back home from Perugia. I’ll link to a couple of other reviews at the bottom of this post and invite you to add your own takeaways in the comments.
So, in no particular order, but rather in the order I found them at the back of my mind, in my notebooks and tweets.
1. Perugia and the Festival are wonderful and I need to come back. Turns out the date has already been fixed. April 15-19 2015.
2. Felix Salmon knows how to rant smartly (or, if you prefer, to speak wisely with some well-placed punches in between). He put the current hype around wonk/explainer journalism in historical perspective.
Key quotes:
- «Explainer journalism is just journalism, but journalism as it should be rather than how it had to be due to constraints.»
- «We’re losing the bundle, we’re going back to something web-native.»
- «No one ever in the history of the world has paid for news.»
- «Breaking news is the most masturbatory thing journalists do. And only journalists are interested in it.»
- «The best journalism school is your own blog.»
- «Develop a distinctive voice and people will want to give you money.»
3. This quote by Chartbeat founder Tony Haile.
«Page impressions don’t measure content, they measure the link to the content. It makes you optimise the wrong thing.» @arctictony #ijf14
â David Bauer (@davidbauer) May 2, 2014
And while we’re at it, this one: «Attention is the only scarcity on the web. Nobody can add a 25th hour to the day. That’s what we should measure.»
4. I liked how Wolfgang Blau used his keynote to ask an important question to which he didn’t have an answer.
«How can it be that in 2014 there is no pan-European medium that addresses people in Europe as Europeans?» @wblau at #ijf14
â David Bauer (@davidbauer) May 2, 2014
5. Chicas Poderosas â a force to reckon with.
6. Note to self: Thou shalt not miss a workshop with Giannina Segnini again.
7. «Every news event creates its own community.» Among everything Storyful CEO Mark Little said, this stood out. It explains what Storyful is doing and highlights an potential most news organisations make poor use of. From a technical perspective, it’s interesting to remember that Storyful measures «velocity of conversations» in social media to identify topics and places where something unusual is happening.
8. Also this:
«You're more often going to be wrong than first» @marklittlenews on why using social media in breaking news requires so much caution. #ijf14
— David Bauer (@davidbauer) May 3, 2014
9. Austria really sucks at transparency. Wasn’t aware of that. They are at the very bottom of the worldwide Right to Information Rating. The good news: There are people fighting to change that.
10. Tear down your «Get shit done» motivational poster and spray those two words on your wall instead: Martin Belam. Once he’s set up a new venture in a couple of weeks (as he did with UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d), this is his magic trick (well, maybe just one of them):
«Everyone on the team can write a bit of crappy JavaScript.» â @MartinBelam on how to get stuff done at @ampp3d.
â David Bauer (@davidbauer) May 2, 2014
11. In the water, he said actually. Dead in the water. But considering the amount of water we got from the sky above Perugia, you might as well leave it out here.
12. This.
«I think the Snowden case has re-established a role for big news brands to do very risky journalism.» @jamesrbuk #ijf14
â David Bauer (@davidbauer) May 1, 2014
13. De Correspondent keeps impressing me a lot. Noted at their founders’ talk (for a more thorough summary, check journalism.co.uk or De Correspondent’s own notes on the talk):
- «We see our journalists as conversation leaders and our readers as experts.»
- «Forget about all the hypes. They are always about the past.»
- «We wanted to go from the exceptions (news) to the underlying rules of society (new).»
14. I think we’ve passed «Peak Tweets on a Map». Good to remember:
Even Twitter itself is skeptical about sentiment analysis in tweets. #ijf14
— Torsten Mueller (@mundustorsten) May 3, 2014
15. More than 17’000 people have signed up for the data journalism online course by the EJC (you can still join).
16. The NYT’s Aron Pilhofer on the state of data journalism: The best pieces are those where the data part is fully immersed in the story. Data journalism should be part of the story, not the story itself. His examples for that: NSA Files Decoded, What Your Activity Tracker Sees and Doesnât See, Giant Slalom: Ted Ligety.
17. Snowfall got its obligatory mention. «You can’t reblog Snowfall. NYT was the only place you could see that.», Felix Salmon said. John Burn-Murdoch of the FT added a few more thoughts.
18. «The fact that PGP hasn’t really become easier to use in the past 15 years shows that governments and corporations don’t want us to use it.» â Dan Gillmor
19. You might want to rethink your realname strategy for user contributions. Says Disqus founder Daniel Ha (paraphrased):
«The quality of comments from people using their real name and those using pseudonyms is the same. The comment quality gap is between anonymous vs. pseudonym/realname. And people with pseudonyms are most active.»
20. Data journalism with a revenue model baked in: The Star Health, built by Code4Kenya, lets users check if their doctor is to be trusted, can be accessed via premium SMS, the publisher gets a share of 50% for each SMS.
21. So many people who are passionate and optimistic about the future of journalism.
More on the International Journalism Festival 2014 in Perugia:
- Investigative Highlights from the Perugia Fest (GIJN)
- Coverage by the Journalism Festival itself
- Notes from the International Journalism Festival (Steve Buttry)
- Add yours…(drop your link in the comments or ping me on Twitter
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