Building Facta: Behind the Scenes
By: Elisabetta Tola
Tags: Ej19, Factful, Tow Knight Program, Journalism

Building Facta: Behind the Scenes

Why and how I embarked on a new adventure — and why I have been so lucky to become #EJ19 Tow-Knight Center fellow

So let’s take a few steps back.

“In a world of fake news and information chaos, we need more journalism.”

That’s how Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian, led his post “Breaking and Remaking News for a new reality,” published on Medium in November. By the way, Rusbridger’s book, Breaking News, is one of the best things I have read in the last few years on how journalism has changed in recent decades and how journalists have faced those changes. It’s full of useful thoughts and ideas, and it helps in exploring and appreciating how The Guardian approached its transition to digital and how difficult and non-linear that process has been, even for a very successful paper.

The Making of a modern newspaper, Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

OK, Rusbridger is obviously not the only one reflecting on the need for journalism now more than ever. Many other authors have discussed and debated along the same lines, and this series of posts will link to many of them. I do agree, for whatever it’s worth. I also agree because I passionately and undisputedly love journalism, and I have wanted it to be my job since I decided to leave science many, many years ago — and well before then, to be truly honest.

But. There is a huge but —a very solid, serious, sad one. In my country, Italy, journalism is still lagging, and making it your profession, more so as a freelancer, is almost impossible — unless you are up for martyrdom, for super-thin earnings, for a very difficult and rarely enjoyable quality of life. Freelancers, particularly highly specialized ones like me, find very limited space and even more limited response to what they do.

I’ll leave an analysis of this for another post. But to make a long story short, we still have editors or deputy ones on big dailies who candidly admit, “We keep the best of our work for the printed newspaper, obviously.” Italians still have newsrooms that are organized in a total pre-Internet fashion, complemented by a separate, quite undefined, “online team” trying to fulfill the need to publish or perish without adequate resources and investments. This online team rarely sees digital journalists, developers, graphic designers, data scientists or any other type of advanced and much-needed skill among its ranks.

For years I have tried to combine the journalistic work I was doing, for very little money and with zero chance to make any sort of impact, with the work that is actually paying my bills and covering my living costs: that of consultant on science communication, trainer and entrepreneur. In 2005 I founded a company, now owned by a great group of friends, fantastic professionals and very dedicated people. Formicablu has been and continues to be a fun adventure and a very nice success. That’s also a story for another time.

But I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to make an impact. (So many of us want this, right? Otherwise we’d be doing something else.) And I wanted to do it in a sustainable way, with many nuances attached to the word “sustainability.” I care about the quality of life my colleagues and I enjoy. I do not want to diminish that, to change that. I care about the environment we work in. It’s great; we have fun; we feel free. I do not want to ruin that feeling and atmosphere. I care about the environment we live in — not strictly environmentally, although I am certainly worried about that, but more so from the cultural and social point of view. I care about the country I live in, which now appears to be intoxicated with hard feelings, a very distrustful attitude, little interest for others’ lives and pains and stories. I want to live in a country that is open, multicultural, secular, creative, true to its history. I feel ashamed to live in a country where there is a persistent and very loud campaign against other human beings, wherever they come from and for whatever reason. I am ashamed to bring up my son, and our children in general, in a place where it is considered acceptable that there are citizens with different rights and statuses. I want to change that.

I believe information can make an impact on how people perceive the great issues of today. I believe journalism can make a difference. I believe journalism can help people see the reality, frame it properly, facilitate a conversation on it, which should be civilized and based on facts, not pure emotions and fears.

But journalism has to change. And it’s not only a technological change we need to pursue: it’s a cultural one. We have to change the terms of our relationship with our readers, our listeners (I am a radio person), our viewers. We need to make the different communities, the small and big groups, associations, aggregations of people, feel that they have a say, that their questions are the ones we care about, that the narrative is actually responding to their information need, not to our wish and desire to talk about what we deem important. We need to bring complexity back into journalism, to respect the people who read, listen, view, interact with us. We need to stop pretending we know them from a distance and we know what they care about.

That’s why I started Facta, together with a very special group of people, and with the idea to enlarge this circle, make it even more diverse and include all the skills, abilities and backgrounds we need to work well. To find out more about Facta and our initial aims, ideas, ambitions and goals, please read our landing page. It’s a work in progress. We are just starting to build it, step by step.