Dear editor,
how are you? Back from the strike with a tan?
What I appreciate about your category is that you don’t even know how to strike properly. Elsewhere they are smarter and organize strikes strategically on Friday or Monday, so they can have a long weekend. But who ever strikes on a Thursday?
And we citizens, guess what, every time we survive anyway. You may be a bastion of democracy but we get more annoyed when the buses strike and we are left standing in the rain at the bus stop, or when traffic immediately goes into chaos. Or when the teachers strike, who have every right since they risk their lives, and we have to figure out where to keep our children and grandchildren.
“Italian news stops again, for the third time within a few months, on April 16, 2026. The mobilization for the renewal of the Fnsi-Fieg labor contract, for fair compensation for freelance colleagues, for the dignity of journalism and the future of information, therefore, continues,” I read from the website of the National Federation of Italian Press.
How lovely, such poorly informed information!
But have you seen the latest data regarding the circulation of periodicals? No, right? I knew it, that’s why I’m making it easier for you here.
Have you ever heard of things like ChatGpt or Claude? Seriously, how long do you think it will take before they steal your job?
I’ll answer with the words of Condé Nast’s CEO, since Americans are always ahead in every field (and we, as you know, are always eager to chase after them): “We are making changes within our technology organization, in response to the rapid progress of artificial intelligence and its impact on our ability to innovate and develop products faster. Teams will be restructured to be more agile and to collaborate more closely with our brands and clients, reducing execution obstacles.”
It seems quite evident to me the correlation between the advance of AI and those “more agile teams” he writes about. You become agile when you are lean and you become lean when you go on a diet… I’m not being catastrophic: in that same statement CEO Roger Lynch announced the closure of Wired Italy.
Yes, that very Wired. It’s closing. Goodbye, farewell, sayonara, bye-bye.
And when did they tell you? On the day of your little operetta strike. Think about how much respect, how important you are, how much you are read or listened to.
By the way, as far as I know they had just changed the newsroom, in Milan. The editor, Luca Zorloni, had been there for 13 months, the economic editor, Tommaso Perrone, about 7 (and he had left the direction of LifeGate). Nothing that could have foretold an imminent death of the publication. Instead, from the USA they pulled the plug. The sores of the Third millennium…
Don’t you see how much your publishers take you for a ride?
Don’t you see that while you ask for a few more coins, the world is burning?
Don’t you see that people don’t even buy you anymore to wrap fish, by now?
You wanted to do journalism without art or part, without reflections, without creative insights? You sold yourselves to the market that demanded chasing the news instead of analyzing it, dissecting it, deepening it? Now a stupid algorithm like a washing machine can do your job.
Because, let’s be honest, anyone who uses AI knows how dumb they are: they do little research, they manage with effort to make collages of others’ work… basically an agency, they can write it for you. An editorial, no.
Editor, the little news item or the press release reprise, artificial intelligences can do them for you indeed. And they do them in five seconds. Why should a publisher keep paying you, if in the exact time you take to find Word among the icons on your chaotic desktop an AI churns out yet another press release that websites bounce around like chain letters? Editor, I hope at least Startmag doesn’t follow this trend maybe due to pressure from companies investing in advertising.
Maximum respect, however, for those lost Japanese on the Pacific islands who still carry on the claims for union raises ignoring the fact that the world has changed long ago. Pretending not to know that they have their asses warm, while newspapers are supported by a host of young precarious workers, all fake freelancers, who struggle running here and there to put together pieces that will be paid in some cases even 5 euros gross, obviously 90 days after the invoice.
All this while current expenses (rent, utilities, food…) must be paid upfront. Ah, obviously under “expenses” I also include the transport subscription, because the newsrooms that pay you a pittance don’t reimburse your travel, nor subscriptions to international publications and various audio and video editing programs to properly do your job.
It has always been said that you can be a journalist and make it only if your dad was a journalist: now I would add that you can only do it if your dad hasn’t yet blown his pension and is able to support you.
But, editor, I’m not here to shoot the Red Cross (or, given the period, the Blue Helmets). I’m criticizing your category (and even you editors, forgive me and let’s be clear) because I believe that the current situation you created by eroding your authority. You are no longer perceived as third and impartial and in this the 5 Stars who called you newsies every two seconds (another category in crisis, and it’s all your fault) and hacks have nothing to do with it. When they arrived you were already struggling with spasms for a long time.
Do we want to talk about Repubblica’s silences on Elkann repeatedly denounced by Calenda? Do we want to talk about the Gazzetta dello Sport that never misses an opportunity to praise Toro and its patron, Cairo, who is also – look at the coincidences – the publisher of the sports newspaper? Do we want to talk about how Cairo has transformed the technology pages of the Corriere della Sera into something like the flyer of a department store? I attach a little photo that includes, among other unmissable pieces, the report on the cardigan.
Speaking of Cairo, I’m quoting here because yesterday his journalists went on strike: “La7 journalists also protest because the publisher applies negligible flat rates to new hires, effectively evading collective and company bargaining, and does not properly pay Sunday work, despite rulings in this regard from the Court of Cassation.”
What a genius, that man. He fills his newspapers with advertising and articles that are other advertisements, his broadcasters with zero-cost talk shows and then he doesn’t even have happy employees on the salary front. What a genius.
But I want to tell you with words not mine, retrieving a tweet from Paolo Ziliani that you surely know and that I saved years ago finding it enlightening:
“There are even those who say his surname is actually an acronym:
CAIRO
How
To get rich
Infinitely
Ruining
Everything”
Miracle in Turin: after 20 years of abuses perpetrated by Cairo against the granata club “La Stampa” notices the outrage of an entire people and asks the Milanese tyrant to leave
Like the blind man of Jericho, the Turin newspaper regains sight and after two decades of… pic.twitter.com/YgLzHga8nu— Paolo Ziliani (@ZZiliani) December 3, 2025
Obviously I haven’t exhausted here the reasons why you have lost authority year after year: I could go on citing the Angelucci newspapers that obviously have to flatter the government, the majority parties and in particular the Ministry of Health (since the Angeluccis make tons of money with private clinics under contract) or the bulletin boards overflowing with press releases that online publications have become.
I have never heard sighs, criticisms and remarks about how big companies are massaged by the Confindustria daily or about the lavish praises to bankers written in newspapers that have shares pledged to the banks of those same bankers.
Editor, let’s look each other in the eye: you have had dozens and dozens of reasons over the years to get angry and stop the presses.
You preferred to look elsewhere.
You have degraded the profession to such an extent that the first semi-illiterate algorithm can compete with you. And I understand this: if you give a young person 5 euros for a piece, that one will never write you the Divine Comedy but will write it with his left hand tied behind his back while trying to get accepted for another 30 proposals from as many publications exhausting the phone credit and the stock of pleas to get through the day.
The result is that nobody reads anymore. Italians get their information on social media. On social media!
As if to say that if I want to eat I don’t go to a restaurant but start licking the greasy paper of a fast food dumpster.
Let’s realize the level reached by the disdain towards you: people get informed in the place that allows everyone to shout the worst nonsense and still be heard. In the place where people insult each other crudely between one work email and another. Those social networks that you helped populate with your newspapers and now moreover don’t even share your articles anymore because they fear losing traffic.
Furthermore, those who don’t get information on social media don’t turn to you, but to Google, which like Meta and company no longer shares articles because it has the same fear and so here comes another AI parasitically exploiting your work. I attach another explanatory screenshot.
Editor, sorry if this time I went off the rails. I have no pretension to teach anyone the job, be clear.
I did my part for all the years of honorable service, now I enjoy my well-deserved retirement.
But as a reader I think I am rightfully pissed off, so much so that, as I already told you, I don’t even buy newspapers anymore: I read them at the bar or while getting a shave.
A special slap then to the Usigrai union. They also protested at Rai: “The dispute for the renewal of the contract of Italian journalists continues. Expired for over 10 years, the labor contract must be renewed to respond to the new modes of journalistic information and provide answers on the wage front which suffer a significant loss of purchasing power decimated by inflation. Usigrai adheres to this third day of strike of Italian journalists and supports Fnsi’s action to continue with more strength the mobilization of newsrooms to guarantee the role of professional information in our country, to defend the dignity of our work and against precariousness.”
Easy to strike, when you are a public employee and stay on board no matter what happens, even after gaffes on world television (any reference to facts and people…).
But don’t you have a surge of dignity and self-respect?
Strike to defend your honor, rather, to say that you are neither mercenaries nor paper pushers for PR offices and lobbies.
Maybe you still have time for a last minute.
A disconsolate one,
Francis Walsingham
