The Davos of journalism takes place in Perugia, Italy

Hundreds of global experts in the media industry gather each year in Perugia, Italy, to talk about the past and future. Some of the items on the schedule look particularly interesting, so I have started putting together my personal agenda.

Thursday April 2  

Local journalism
Reinventing local news: how digital transformation works for small and medium-sized newsrooms
09:30 - 10:30 thursday 2/04/2020 - Sala della Vaccara, Palazzo dei Priori. On the panel are Alexandra Borchardt, Catarina Carvalho, Matteo Rainisio, Hannah Suppa.


Collaborative journalism
Enemies to friends: how news companies can partner for survival
10:45 - 11:45 thursday 2/04/2020 - Sala del Dottorato. On the panel are Jane Barrett of Reuters and Guido Baumhauer of Deutsche Welle.

Travel
Digital travel journalism: marrying creativity and technology
12:00 - 13:00 thursday 2/04/2020 - Palazzo Sorbello. On the panel are Ana Banas of the BBC, Nicoletta Crisponi, Brekke Fletcher of CNN, and Dmitry Shishkin of Culture Trip.

Collaboration emerges as an effective business model

 Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said just before signing the Declaration of Independence, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

News publishers have taken this idea to heart with a trend toward collaborating as a means of survival when so many economic forces are working against them. Collaboration, rather than competition, allows small, vulnerable news organizations to spread the risk and cost of journalism that challenges the powers that be and serves the public interest. 

When they collaborate, small newsrooms get access to at least three scarce resources: time, in the form of help from other organizations; expertise, in the form of people who know how to do things they don't; and money, because the combined organizations can sometimes attract grants that none of them could by themselves.

One example: Nieman Lab reported on the Institute for Nonprofit News's collaborative investigation on the lack of hospitals and health care services in rural America. Twelve news organizations in seven states participated.

Hospitals in rural areas of the U.S. have been closing as population declines, much as local news media have been disappearing. The Institute for Nonprofit News, founded 10 years ago, has 230 members and promotes sharing of resources and expertise that support investigative journalism in the public interest. The funding comes from a variety of national and local foundations and nonprofits.

This hub nurtures investigative journalism in LatAm

Huertas: Developing the next generation

BOGOTA, Colombia --  Independent news media in Latin America often lack the financial resources to act as a counterweight to the political powers and multinational businesses in the region.

But these media, many of them digital natives, have found that by banding together they can multiply their scarce resources and magnify their impact beyond their borders to challenge these powers.

One example is a platform for journalists interested in investigative journalism, Connectas.org, based in Bogota, which organizes training and operates a collaboration hub for investigative journalists (in Spanish, ConnectasHub), offers grants of up to $3,000, and publishes investigative projects from all over the region.

Versión en español

The founder and director of Connectas, Carlos Eduardo Huertas, told me in an interview that the goal of the platform is to "pull together a new generation of journalists with training in practical methods of doing in-depth journalism and investigative journalism".

Think small: the new metrics of engagement for news

Forget about the big numbers of total page views per month or unique users per month.

Fans are engaged and willing to give their time and money.

Those numbers are misleading and meaningless. They had meaning only in the days when the media business depended on mass media, massive audiences, and products aimed at the masses.

That was when the news media depended on advertising.

Today the business of media is all about touching potential customers with personalized, customized messages. It's about identifying the small number of people who are truly fans of your publication or the stars on your team. It's about strengthening the emotional attachment people have to your brand and its mission.

How the big numbers mislead us

In their very successful campaign to reach 1 million paid subscriptions for their digital-only edition, the Washington Post learned that the users most likely to subscribe came to their site three times a month.