For some reason I woke up early today.  What to do?  Why take the dog out, and grab a coffee at my local bar, of course.  I also managed to lay my hands on today’s edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano, which leads with a headline stating that Italy’s Justice Minister Angelino Alfano is under investigation for alleged abuse of office.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account of what is in Italy’s recently launched independent newspaper, Il Fatto Quotidiano, today.  No, something else.

Il Fatto Quotidiano Not on Display

When I got to my local news-stand, I looked for Il Fatto Quotidiano, but could not see it amongst the usual crop of Italian dailies.  No, I had to ask for it.  I was told that twenty one copies of the newspaper had been supplied that morning, but I thought it odd that they were not on display.

I wonder if anyone else has come across this.  It does seem strange that this hot selling paper is not there for all to see.  Or perhaps someone is not too keen on people buying this paper?

Got to go near some other news-stands today, so I’ll have a look and see what the situation is elsewhere.  Out of curiosity.

From what I’ve been told by Italian reader Elisa, Italy’s last independent paper, Indro Montanelli’s La Voce, was forced to shut down its presses.  This does not bode well for Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Looking at the Italian Wikipedia entry on La Voce, it appears as though it’s demise was down to a fall in sales and revenues, but it is interesting that Elisa should comment that it was ‘forced’ to close down.

Next week I’ll be boarding one of those flying sardine cans and making my way toward Italy. One of the things I look forward to is drizzling some of my neighbor Enrico’s olive oil over…well, just about anything, but maybe some of the lettuce from Enrico’s garden.

Enroco’s oil is “extra virgin” olive oil. I saw them harvesting it. I even did a little harvesting myself (video).

It’s unbelievable how good a real extra virgin oil tastes. What surprises you though is how much of it seems to be on the market. The supermarkets are full of big bottles of industrial crap olive oil.

Now, they don’t taste much of olives. How can that be?

After all, to be “extra virgin” an oil must have very low acid and be cold-pressed. Virgin means the oil was produced by the use of physical means and no chemical treatment. The IOOC, International Olive Oil Council, says that extra virgin oil must contain no more than 0.8% acidity.

How good are the industrial oils? Well, hard to tell, but Michele Vitale alerts us to the sorry state of the extra virgins in Italy. When 31 oils were tested:

1 out of 31 turned out to have the features required for the “extra virgin” label. The rest of them were not compliant; nevertheless these oil were bottled by their ruthless producers with a label they did not deserve and that was, basically, false. ~ The lies under the labels of olive oil / 2

Yeah, that’s why they taste so crappy. It’s not just Italy, of course, Greek oils imported to the US didn’t fare much better

But, you know, it’s big corporations, and they are our friends. They only do this to us because it’s for our own good, don’t they? I mean, why should we be eating extra virgin oils anyway?

I’ll tell you:

Javier Menendez from the Catalan Institute of Oncology and Antonio Segura-Carretero from the University of Granada in Spain led a team of researchers who set out to investigate which parts of olive oil were most active against cancer. Menendez said, “Our findings reveal for the first time that all the major complex phenols present in extra-virgin olive oil drastically suppress overexpression of the cancer gene HER2 in human breast cancer cells”. ~ Extra-Virgin Olive Oil Has Anti-Cancer Components

But this only works for cold-pressed extra virgin olive oils, because heat damages these beneficial components.

So, buy good oil. It’ll be expensive. Don’t try to save a few bucks on commercial, industrial oil. It sucks.

The first edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano, Italy’s newest daily, sold like hot cakes yesterday.  All 150,000 copies had disappeared by about 7 or 8 am on the day of the newspaper’s official launch.

In total some 182,ooo copies sold on the first day, although quite a number downloaded the .pdf version, and nearly brought Il Fatto Quotidiano’s servers to its knees.

After a long wait, I did download the .pdf version of Il Fatto Quotidiano, but I still wanted to see the ‘paper’ version for myself, and this morning my local news vendor did not let me down. This evening I asked the guy who mans my local news-stand if he had any copies of Il Fatto Quotidiano left.  After rummaging around, he told me that he did not.  A sell out on day one, and day to.  Not bad for a paper launched in today’s economic climate.

Here, then, are my first impressions of the newspaper which aims to set new standards for press freedom in Italy.  And as well as expressing my own opinion I also asked a few Italians for their two cents on Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Today’s edtion of Il Fatto Quotidiano sits in front of me as I write this.

Newspaper readership levels have been falling considerably not only on the other side of the Atlantic, but also in Italy, and I know of one major Italian paper which is about to adopt the tabloid format in an attempt to save money.  In view of this situation, the first signs for Il Fatto Quotidiano are good, especially when one considers that, in terms of content, it is probably the most expensive paper on the Italian market today.

Il Fatto Quotidiano – The Look

The first Edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano

It’s not quite tabloid format at 450 mm x 310, and the technically inclined may define it as being closer to the so-called ‘Berlinner format’ which is 470 mm by 315 mm.

The colour of choice seems to be red, from  several Italians I showed the paper to got the impression that it had contents which leaned to the left.  Red, after all, it a colour which has strong associations with communism, as much in Italy as anywhere else in the world.

Not too many people were keen on the layout of this newspaper, which someone said was ‘amateurish’ and another commented that it looked like a ’school newspaper.’  I partly agree with this.

Il Fatto Quotidiano does makes quite extensive use of white-space, which is something which was picked up upon by other Italians, and this aspect led to the perception that the paper was not ‘authoritative.  In my opinion though, the use of white-space makes the paper look a little more reader friendly than some of Italy’s other dailies which tend to be dominated by huge blocks of text which I find intimidating.   I do like the look of La Repubblica, which is another Italian paper which makes use of colour images and white-space, and I have a copy of La Repubblica in front of me too.

Back to Il Fatto Quotidiano.  The choice of fonts is a little odd, as is the use of underlining to highlight some headlines and subtitles, and this is something a journalist friend of mine noted too.

Right, aesthetically  Il Fatto Quotidiano may not win any prizes for ‘Italian design’, but as those who inhabit the web know, ‘content is king’.  So, what are Il Fatto Quotidiano’s articles like?

Il Fatto Quotidiano – The Content

Today’s headline, which was accompanied by a picture of a discontented looking Berlusconi, bore the headline, translated from Italian: Here’s the Plan to Destroy RAI.  This will have hit a few Italians between the eyes, I’m sure, as government interference in the running of Italy’s state owned television channels is hot news in Italy at the moment, but up to now, nobody has claimed that Italy’s public television is under threat of disembodiment though.  A strong start then!

On page two, the leading article is also about supposed government tinkering in the running of Italy’s RAI television channels,  and at the bottom of the page the subject of press freedom is mentioned, again this is something which is on the minds of many in today’s Italy.

The theme of the destruction of RAI continues onto page three too.

On other pages, articles cover more Italian controversies, as well has covering Obama’s new world order proposal with regard to peace and climate change.  Aside from the report on Obama’s speech at the UN, there are a few other brief pieces on overseas affairs.

Football which Kills Children

On page twelve there is the ‘inquest’ section which leads with the headline ‘The Football which Kills His Children‘.  Such a claim does grab one’s attention, as I am sure you will admit.

The article examines the unhealthy relationship which exists between Italy’s favourite sport and the use of performance enhancing drugs, the use of which appear to have led to the illness and premature deaths of a number of Italian footballers over the years.

On the facing page, there is some culture in the form of a review of the Larsson film, Millenium Part 2.  Alongside the review there are some cultural titbits on television, fashion and music.

Following the movie review, there is a TV guide, and next to this there is something about the world wide web, including feedback which has been collected from Twitter.  Very much in keeping with the times.

In the rest of the paper, which is nineteen pages in length incidentally, there is more comment on goings on in contemporary Italy via a column by one Bruno Tinti, plus a readers letters section with a satirical cartoon.

The final two pages of today’s edition of contain a story about the launch of Il Fatto Quotidiano, and a page full of readers messages of goodwill towards Italy’s latest newspaper.

My Verdict on Il Fatto Quotidiano

Il Fatto Quotidiano – The Newest Italian Newspaper

I’ve never reviewed a newspaper before, so I would advise others to find similar articles or posts in their own preferred publications so they can make up their own minds.

Having provided this caveat, I’d say that Il Fatto Quotidiano is brief but meaty.  It does not pull its punches and this may mean that a few libel actions against it may be launched as time progresses.  I hope the paper has already engaged a good team of lawyers to protects its journalists in the Italian courts, but the facts presented should make the lawyers’ work simpler.  If the sales of this paper grow at a meteoric rate, affording the services good lawyers will probably not be much of a problem.

I do not have much of the problem with the writing style, as it seems to be easier enough for me to understand.  If I can understand it, seeing as I am not Italian, Italians themselves will have few problems.  Someone today told me that sometimes they found articles in one Italy’s big newspapers, Il Corriere della Sera, difficult to understand at times.

What is also easy to comprehend is that Il Fatto Quotidiano does not paint contemporary Italy is a good light, or at least I do not think it does.  It could do with a little more emphasis on the better aspects of life in Italy perhaps, but it is early days yet.  As someone else who flicked through the paper noted, the paper does seem to home in on controversy.  Whether this is a good or bad thing will only become evident as time passes, and as sales of this new paper increase or evaporate into nothing.

I’m going to keep an eye on Il Fatto Quotidiano for sure, but am not too sure Italy’s establishment will appreciate the presence of such a controversial paper in a country in which most of the dailies are run by some interest group or other.  The lack of control will worry more than a few of Italy’s movers and shakers, I’m sure.

The real measure of the acceptance of Il Fatto Quotidiano as a voice in Italy will be, and as was pointed out in a comment on my post Sold Out, the First Edtion of New Italian Newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano by reader Regina, whether this paper makes it onto one of the television programs in Italy which carries out ‘what’s in tomorrow’s press’ type reviews.  This remains to be seen.

Will it be a Sell Out for a Third Time in a Row?

I’d like to know if Il Fatto Quotidiano will continue to fly off Italy’s news-stands, so tomorrow I’ll attempt to buy another copy, but I have not placed an order this time.  This is because I am curious to see if Il Fatto Quotidiano will continue to sell as fast as salami on the run up to the festive season.

If anybody else reading this has had an opportunity to peruse Il Fatto Quotidiano, I’d be interested to hear their opinion.

Hyperforeignism is a cool word. What is it? Well, it occurs when you think you know what, say, French sounds like. “They drop all the endings,” you think to yourself—cleverly as it turns out, because you’ve actually seen some French movies and thus think you’re an expert. So you pronounce “coup de grâce” as “coo de grah” when in reality it is more like cu de gras.

You have hypercorrected. You would have been ok just pronouncing the word like it looks in English. but you thought, Hmmm, this word seems to come from the land of the French Fry, so we’ll just pronounce it like the French Fry People in the movies pronounce it.

You would, of course, be wrong. You’d also be wrong about the fries, which are really Belgian, or so I’ve heard.

I was reminded of hyperforeignism by kottke.org: Hyperforeignism. He gives us an example:

The noun octopus is often made plural in English as octopi, originally from the mistaken belief that all Latin nouns ending in -us take -i to form their plural. However, this is only correct for Latin masculine nouns of the second declension.

Ok, let’s undeclensh a minute. Why don’t we ever do this for commonly babbled Italian words? We mangle them, not in ways that suggest we’re induced to hypercorrect them by our knowledge of Italian. No, we often just change the vowel sounds without regard for reality. Sometimes I think there’s a vast (or half-vast) conspiracy to make travelers to Italy look stupid and sound offensive when they order a cookie. But that was a Monty Python skit and nobody remembers them…or maybe Italian is just too darn beautiful—you’d just die if you heard its (true) lilting tones wash over you like the lapping waters of lusty love.

Anyway, it’s strange, isn’t it? Even well-regarded tee vee chefs in America say idiotic things like ree-cah-ta instead of pronouncing the word the way the vowels are pronounced in Italian (or English, btw): Ri-cO-ta. After all, it’s all coded into the way it’s written: ricotta. If it were ricatta it would be written that way, wouldn’t it? well, it would in Italian.

I mean sheesh, I’ve heard Alton Brown bungle ricotta. My friends insist on saying it wrong, even knowing they’re screwing up. It’s some kind of badge of culinary courage or something to pronounce the damn word like no one in the universe would pronounce it except that everyone (American) does and that’s that.

And those cookies! Where do we get bis-caah-tee out of biscotti? Does everyone who has never set foot on the Italian continent think that the “o” character is written to be pronounced like an “ah!”. It’s like you can’t go into a fake Italian cafe and order a cookie any more. You pronounce biscotti correctly and some snot-nosed “barista” is correcting you: Beeeee-scAAAAH-teeee? You think you’re in the dentist’s office. Say biscAAAAAHti while we jab you in the back of your throat with something cheap, wooden and unpolished…

And don’t get me started on “bruschetta”. I’ll let Sari Gilbert take it from here. Read LIFESTYLE: Bruschetta, biscotti et al.

I gotta get outta here. The veins in my forehead are starting to pop.

Il Fatto Quotidiano is a new newspaper which hit Italy’s news-stands today.  By Italian standards, this newspaper is quite a bit different from others to be found in Italy.

Il Fatto Quotidiano – New Italian Newspaper

In a way, Italy’s newest national newspaper got off to a good start today, in that I could not find a copy at my local news-stand.

There must have been quite a lot of  interest, because the same news-stand bore a hand-written note announcing the fact that copies of Il Fatto Quotidiano had sold out.  I was told that only a few copies had arrived, and from what I’ve understood via Facebook, others have been unable to obtain a copy of what has already come to be known a ‘Il fatto’.

I’ve asked my news-stand to reserve a copy of tomorrow’s edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano for me, by the way.

Why all this interest in a newspaper in Italy?  Well, Il Fatto Quotidiano is run by the Italian equivalents of Woodward and Bernstein, for a start. But there’s more.

A New Concept for Italian Journalism

Unlike other Italian newspapers, Il Fatto Quotidiano is not tied to an ‘interest group’, which means it is not allied to a political party, and nor is it owned by one of Italy’s family dynasties.

This newspaper intends to report hard facts, and not the often diluted versions of events which appear on the pages of other Italian dailies.

Mini-Update: A .pdf copy, over 7 megabytes, of the first edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano is available for download, but only for today: Il Fatto Quotidiano.pdf – and if you can get to it.  My copy is downloading, slowly.

Mini-Update 2: Copy of Il Fatto Quotidiano downloaded. It took ages.

Il Fatto Quotidiano looks OK, and art director, Paolo Residori, states that it is ‘British Style’, which is interesting.  Many of the articles criticise the way Italy’s government is doing its job, and, as promised, there are plenty of facts.  At first sight, the style does not appear to be too opinionated either, although I’ve yet to read many of the articles in detail.

The only negative thing I would say about Italy’s newest newspaper, for what it is worth, is that there are not enough paragraphs, as is common in Italian writing.  Some of the articles do contain paragraphs, whereas others do not seem to contain anywhere near enough.

I have heard it say that Italians tend to regard huge blocks of text as being ‘authoritative’, whereas texts with things like white space and paragraphs are apparently perceived as being trivial.  Still, it would be nice to reach a compromise and perhaps try, slowly, to change the way Italians view texts with paragraphs.  They are so much less of a chore to read, as writing guides such as the Owl at Purdue state:  Paragraphs and Paragraphing.  I’d love to know if any readability studies have been carried out in Italy, adds he, digressing a little too much.

—–end of updates——

Italy’s Woodward and Bernstein

One could view the launch of the newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano as being an attempt to bring true journalism to Italy, the sort of journalism which allowed investigative reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to help uncover the goings on which led to the infamous Watergate scandal.

Behind this newspaper are Italy’s Woodward and Bernstein equivalents, Antonio Padellaro and Marco Travaglio.

Travaglio is very well known in Italy for being a journalist who is highly critical of Italy’s power-mongers and his words have made him a number of powerful enemies in Italy.   Recently, for example, attempts have been made to have Travaglio excluded from making his regular appearances on Italian political talk show AnnoZero which is broadcast on Italian state television.

Antonio Padellaro, while not as well known as Marco Travaglio perhaps, is another Italian journalist who has attempted to report on intrigues involving the shady affairs Italy’s political masters, and others.

Whether Il Fatto Quotidiano’s investigative duo will uncover any Italian style Watergates remains to be seen, and it will be interesting to see if this ‘innovative’ approach to journalism in Italy manages to survive.

Without a doubt, Il Fatto will be subject to various attempts to shut it down, as many Italy’s movers and shakers are extremely sensitive to negative criticism.

In Colour and Digital Formats

The first Edition of Il Fatto Quotidiano

Printed in colour and in both hard copy and digital formats, Il Fatto Quotidiano can be bought from news-stands like any normal newspaper, at a cost of €1.20.  Subscribers will also be able to download a .pdf version of the newspaper.  For €130 a year subscription readers will be able to download a digital .pdf version of the newspaper daily.

A subscription plan for overseas readers is to be announced shortly too.

As a matter of interest, Il Fatto Quotidiano was distributed to some 15,000 Italian news-stands today.

For the moment, the  Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper is only 16 pages in length, although if it does take off, one imagines that the number of pages will increase too.

Those behind this new venture were not 100% certain that this new journal would be launched.  Indeed, on the Il Fatto Quotidiano presentation website, it is stated that this new paper would only be born if people subscribed to it.

People must have done, because it exists!

Road to Success Could be Bloody

If, by any chance, Il Fatto Quotidiano does become a major force in Italian journalism, then it could bring about positive change to Italy.  However the road to success is likely to be rough and, possibly, bloody.

Italy’s newest newspaper faces other problems too.  Firstly, Italians are not the world’s greatest newspaper readers, and secondly, and unlike the rest of Italy’s press, this newspaper, in an attempt to remain independent,  is not going to accept the subsidies which the Italian government hands out to the rest of Italy’s newspaper industry.  Il Fatto Quotidiano is going to rely instead on income from subscribers, supporters, and advertisers to keep it going.

Still early signs are good, in that people obviously have taken an interest, as is evidenced by both the launch and the fact that I and a few others could not get hold of a copy!

With thanks to Alessio Baù for helping me find the First Edition image which can been seen on the right.

More information on Il Fatto Quotidiano can be found here , in Italian:  L’Antefatto – Il Fatto Quotidiano