This article was written by the Centro di giornalismo permanente team and lightly edited by IPI for length and clarity. Receive regular updates on IPI’s innovation and media sustainability work by subscribing to our newsletter, The Outlook: Media Innovation Unlocked.
Founded in 2018, the Centro di giornalismo permanente is an Italian collective of freelance journalists created with the aim of finding work and economic stability in an increasingly crisis-ridden publishing world.
To respond to these needs, the collective has worked on three axes: the promotion of workshops at capped prices, in-person journalistic outreach events and in-depth investigation that goes beyond the news.
In recent months we have felt the need to produce something truly ours, always thinking about the need to speak to members of younger generations, in Italy often considered distant and distrustful of the media world. This was the point at which we joined the IPI’s New Media Incubator.
Our response to that need took shape in the form of a channel on the streaming platform Twitch. We created this to address issues that we have been dealing with for years as a collective, in a way that would reach a new, younger audience. Those issues include precariousness in the world of journalism, conflicts and human rights violations, gender issues, migration, mafias and extremism.
The incubator helped us in approaching the project phase of ‘La Serranda’, the programme that was launched on Twitch last February, in the most appropriate way. The programme also led to a boost in the following of our Spotify and YouTube channels.
Thanks to the consolidation of the existing community and the addition of new audiences, mainly young people, who started to support the Centro di giornalismo permanente through its channel on Twitch, today our collective is ready for the second phase, which will be structured in two directions.
The first involves working on the autonomy and sustainability of the channel with new content and format, which will be possible after the affiliation process on Twitch, for which we already meet the platform’s requirements.
The second will integrate the channel on Twitch even more deeply with the other structural axes of the Centro di giornalismo permanente, first and foremost the in-person events. The aim is to unite the communities that today support the collective and a point of convergence will be FIRE, the festival of investigation and journalistic reportage that we have been organizing in Rome in June for the last two years. In the two previous editions, more than 1,000 people attended FIRE.
The Centro di giornalismo permanente was one of the participants in IPI’s New Media Incubator, part of the Media Innovation Europe (MIE) project, co-funded by the European Commission. The programme is led by the International Press Institute, implemented in collaboration with Thomson Media, the Media Development Foundation and BIRN.
