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by licnep 1613 days ago
Meh, as an italian i find the quality of fanpage journalism to be pretty low. It's mostly clickbait and "let's send a leftist to a right-wing protest and see if they get beaten up or catch somebody doing nazi salutes".

I'm still happy they exist and are succeeding, but i feel that real investigative jouranlism is dying in Italy. With the fall of newspaper sales most outlets are just incentivized to publish low quality clickbait, or government propaganda if they live off of government grants.

2 comments

Random question: could you suggest some good Italian journalism to follow? Right now I just follow Repubblica and a handful of technology journalists I've found through reading articles there.

I'm a security researcher and am learning Italian with the goal of being able to speak at a conference there in the next year or two. As my language skills improve I've been trying to find some good cybersecurity and long form reporting as well as Instagram/Twitter users to follow to force Italian into my daily life and hopefully begin picking up technical jargon and colloquialisms. Anything you could point to would be greatly appreciated -- especially if there is an Italian equivalent of HN.

> could you suggest some good Italian journalism to follow

Treccani, at treccani.it

Not perfect content wise, nor technically - missing RSS. Nonetheless, in general involving vetted, non "random" (lacking quality, as seems to be typical) writers.

> Right now I just follow Repbl

I had the misfortune to stumble into that disgrace on or around 3 Mar 2020, where during a search engine generic search a title from that undead was returned, and it read: "Coronavirus: seven regions hit, 27 million italians". Read the title, re-read the date. See what you get from that. Careful with your sources, because in some countries journalism is well below ground level, and digging.

AgendaDigitale, DDAY, Valigia Blu, The Submarine, Il Post, Il Sole 24 Ore
I just read (following this recommendation) an article from valigiablu.it : it's excellent! - what is going on here? My constant massive feeling of doom vanished in front of a properly done intellectual practice, "Come Cristo Comanda".

It has RSS at https://www.valigiablu.it/feed/

Most of the major Italian newspapers' websites have paywalls but most libraries provide free online access to thousands and thousands of magazines and newspapers.

E.g. my local library system (here in US) uses PressReader and it has the Corriere (one of the major Italian newspapers) as well as 'Gazzetta dello Sport', 'Libero', 'Il Foglio', 'Il Tempo', '24 Ore' (economy news, similar to FT, down to the page color), etc.

Most daily newspapers would typically have weekly sections on specific topics, e.g. Corriere has 'Scienza e ambiente' etc. As for technical jargon, on the magazine front and on the same site, you can find the Italian edition of Wired as well as several other magazines on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.

Specifically relevant for your use-case, one of the monthly magazines is 'Hacker Journal'.

Having said that, the UX of the PressReader site is workable but not great (you can get the 'full fidelity' view but it requires a lot of scrolling around to read, or you can use a 'text' view that is more accessible).

Several issues seem to be on archive.org so you don't even need a library account for that: https://archive.org/details/hackerjournal_italian.

I used to read la Repubblica but the quality of the online content has gone down significantly (the physical newspaper is still good). I think ilpost.it is well curated non-partisan journalism - I’m a happy subscriber - and for more in depth articles I like internazionale.it, which instead is left wing but not to irritating levels. Hope it helps :)
Just checked ilpost.it (which seems well done), it has RSS at https://www.ilpost.it/feed/

Internazionale.it writes that it "publishes weekly the best of newspapers around the world" - nonetheless, it seems to also be a positive intellectual source: it seems to contain original articles, selected translations (good for the selection effort: I just read a superb pick from Al Jazeera), but also compilative articles that discuss and integrate international journalistic interventions about specific topics - so, there are authors that present a topic through abridging the best articles about it (see https://www.internazionale.it/notizie/alessandro-lubello/202... ).

It has RSS at http://www.internazionale.it/sitemaps/rss.xml

--

Marginal note: in January 2020, the printed version of Internazionale reported, I believe in the coverpage, that a concerned government of Italy formally complained against China about obscurity in the virus spread that hit the Middle Kingdom, which reportedly replied "do not make a fuss about this petty thing".

Internazionale is actually the best newspaper in italy. The opinionists are very smart too.
ilpost.it
I hear what you're saying, but bait is the best way to catch fish. If you want to go fishing for racists, it's best to use race bait.
> I hear what you're saying, but bait is the best way to catch fish. If you want to go fishing for racists, it's best to use race bait.

The point is that it's not exactly news that at right wing rallies you can find racists. It's not exactly award winning journalism in my opinion.