Bruised but still effective: journalism rediscovers its strength

Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

edited by Marco Nurra

🔔 Pleased to announce our first +450 speakers #ijf17. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!

• The press freedom crisis in the United States. During the campaign and since becoming president, Donald Trump has regularly undermined journalism’s role in healthy democracies. So says Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, whose organization is gearing up to take on what he calls “a crisis” for press freedom in the United States.
• Bannon says the media has no power. Trump calls it the “fake news media.” But that isn’t how they acted this week, writes Jay Rosen: “For a moment there I thought these guys were serious about treating the news media as ‘the opposition party’ and trying to remove it as a check on power. That seemed to be the plan. They had the pieces in place. But when Michael Flynn was vanquished from the White House they revealed to us that for now at least they’re unable go through with it.”
• Shutting down ‘fake news’ could move us closer to a modern-day ‘1984’. Remember George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? There.
• Journalists, battered and groggy, find a renewed sense of mission. “There is this sense of urgency and energy that I feel now that reminds me of being 29 and in a very different situation: in the middle of a revolutionary situation in Russia,” said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.
• How The New York Times is clawing its way into the future. “I think the public anxiety to actually have professional, consistent, properly funded newsrooms holding politicians to account is probably bigger than all of the other factors put together.”
  🔔 Mark Thompson will be a #ijf17 speaker
• “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.” The Washington Post editor, Marty Baron, said the paper isn’t covering Trump any differently than it would have covered Clinton.
• Condé Nast has learned to love tangling with Trump. It’s not just the New Yorker and Teen Vogue. The luxury publisher has it in for the president.
  🔔 Wolfgang Blau will be a #ijf17 speaker
• In a chaotic presidency, Civics 101 is giving listeners a reintroduction to how the U.S. government works, in order to help to contextualize Trump’s presidency for those who don’t have much background knowledge.
• To restore trust, enhance transparency. Make explaining how we do what we do an essential part of our journalism, not an afterthought.
• The Facebook founder has announced a plan to more actively use his platform’s power to intervene in people’s lives in real ways. BuzzFeed News talked to him.
• Why Donald Trump’s face keeps showing up on content ads? He isn’t just all over the news; he’s also showing up in programmatic ads.

International Journalism Festival is the biggest annual media event in Europe. It’s an open invitation to interact with the best of world journalism. All sessions are free entry for all attendees, all venues are situated in the stunning setting of the historic town centre of Perugia.