Notes from the 2015 International Journalism Festival in Perugia

Last week I attended the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, and I think IJF15 was the best yet. Sourcefabric has been at the last four festivals, and in 2012 Sourcefabric won their ‘Future12’ showcase for startups in news. IJF15 was certainly one of the largest events of its kind in the world - at any given moment, there were at least six parallel tracks on the program, five days, 200 events, 500 speakers, and the vast majority of them were of a uniformly high value.

In fact, the International Journalism Festival gives high-priced industry events serious competition, and my hat goes off to the organizers, Christopher Potter, Arianna Ciccone, Francesca Cimmino and the team for creating such a unique event.

In terms of the takeaways from this year’s International Journalism Festival, the most important from my perspective (completely unbiased, of course) is that Sourcefabric launched our long-awaited Superdesk newsroom management platform, and a new website, www.superdesk.org to tell more about it.

Infrastructure

We had quite a few interesting conversations in Perugia about newsroom infrastructure, especially in the context of what many said during the event: For many news organizations, infrastructure is one of the greatest limits to survival, let alone innovation: It’s nice to talk about the latest trend or gadget, but without an infrastructure to serve it, it will only be talk.

This underscores why we think Superdesk is such a significant initiative for the news business - it’s an end-to-end platform for managing a newsroom, it’s modular and expandable, it’s open source, and it’s being built by journalists, for journalists. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversations we began in Perugia, and to getting Superdesk deployed in more newsrooms!

Mobile

There was a lot of talk this year about mobile, and some of my favorite conversations were with the team behind the StoryMaker platform about their app and ways to get newsrooms more involved with their communities. I genuinely like StoryMaker - it’s like a wizard for making video news stories - and think it needs to be further integrated into conversations on both UGC verification and on community building.

I’ve long been impressed with what AJ+ has been doing with its mobile app, and I especially appreciate how much work they’re putting into the question of engagement. The AJ+ app is elegant and useful, and they’re covering a lot of stories most US news organizations don’t.

Virtual reality reporting

Virtual reality has been on the cusp of mass acceptance since the late 1980s. I remember writing about the startup Sense 8 in 1989, for example, which only proves that I am officially An Old. What’s changed, explained Syracuse University professor and Innovation Chair Dan Pacheco, is the rise of high-performance virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift.

Facebook bought Oculus last year for more than $2 billion, and Google has invested $542 million into a competing company, the secretive Magic Leap; many in tech believe VR is set to explode. If it indeed does, Pacheco wants news organizations to be ready to use virtual reality in news reporting - he’s in Oculus’ developer program - and was shooting 360-degree immersive video in Perugia. He also provided an Oculus unit for participants to try out. 

Keynotes

For me, the best keynotes this year were by Aron Pilhofer, the Guardian’s head of digital, and Jeff Jarvis, the City University of New York professor and digital guru. In some ways, the talks were compatible, as Pilhofer was arguing that journalism today is a team sport, combining reporting, visuals, data, and analytics into a cohesive offering. Jarvis argued that in an age where social media is ubiquitous, news organizations need to focus on their relationships with the communities they serve. “They don’t need us to talk about The Dress,” he said.

Where’s the rest of Europe?

Perugia is an amazing event, but I noted that many European countries were somewhat underrepresented - you’d think the French, Germans and Dutch, let alone the New Member States - would be there in force, but were not. I expect that will change as the word-of-mouth about Perugia and the IJF grow, their participation will also increase. In the meantime, I’ll be happy to keep coming back to one of the best journalism events on the calendar.

Other views

The International Journalism Festival is sprawling event, and it’s hard to capture in a single article. I’d recommend checking out David Bauer’s excellent post, as well as Zara Rahman’s. Also, most sessions were recorded and are available on the IJF YouTube channel.