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I would like to point out that I have not consulted specific investigations (if any exist) nor have I done any particular studies on a topic like this which affects not only the local reality, but the national, if not European and, in a broad sense, global reality.
It is obvious, in any case, that in Messina e in in all over the worldjournalism, especially that printed on paper, is going through a profound crisis: we have the first evidence of this by considering the number of newsstands closed in recent years, due, obviously, to the drastic reduction in the number of newspaper readers: it seems that more than half of the newsstands active in the 1980s closed.
The causes of the crisis are also known: the first – most certain – is the advent of the digital age, which dates back to 1997, the year in which SixDegrees (SeiGradi) was born in New York, from which the diffusion of unstoppable gods social networks and in particular of Facebook (at first Facemash), invented by the twenty-year-old Harvard university student, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2003, and accompanied by the capillary, hypertrophic development of smartphones in every corner of the planet.
At the same time, in the era ofhomo sapiens (which lasted many millennia) the era ofhomo videns, according to methods that have been illustrated in Italy by Fiorenzo Facchini, Giovanni Sartori; Umberto Galimberti: we have, in other words, moved on from the culture of reading (of thinking and listening), typical ofhomo sapiensto the culture of seeing and typing, typical ofhomo vidensthat is, from the “sequential intelligence”, which allowed the homo sapiens to reach the high peaks of knowledge, creativity and science, to the “simultaneous intelligence” (Simone) ofhomo videnswhich only produces accumulation of data and, at most, the “video banality” of Internet-controlled information (Sartori, Galimberti).
Of course, the reader has progressively become disaffected with the written page (of the newspaper and the book), opting for other, less demanding – but less educational – ways of knowing. The phenomenon is particularly evident among young people born in the last twenty years of the last century (Millennials) and in the first decades of the third millennium (Generation Z).
But there is a contributing cause (or a consequence?) at the basis of readers’ disaffection with the written page, the newspaper and the book: the effective crisis of commitment, of individual and collective responsibility, of democracy (to put it briefly), accompanied by political indifference (stated for equidistance) and by a more or less underground authoritarianism, nationalism, populism – they are all synonymous – of a neo-fascist nature.
It is not a small loss, if we consider that modern journalism, born in Milan, in the twenty years (1860-1880) of the Scapigliatura, carried out and continues to carry out in Italy, on the traced, in particular, dto Corrado Alvaro edto Indro Montanelli, the constructive, educational, positively informative function that theEncyclopédie of the Enlightenment had carried out in France starting from 1750.
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In Messina, to return to our garden, only one paper newspaper, «La Gazzetta del Sud», published by the Bonino Pulejo Foundation (supported by the Catanese newspaper «La Sicilia») and only one paper magazine, «Moleskine», founded and directed by Geri Villaroel, worthily represent the glorious journalism of the city of the Strait, which boasted, before the 1908 earthquake, dozens of newspapers and a However consisting of newspapers in the second half of the last century.
However, in the last five decades, many online newspapers have flourished. Just think of «Tempostretto», «Normanno», «Il Nuovo Soldo», «StrettoWeb», «Messinaweb.it», «Messina Today», «Sicania.me», «LetteraEmme», «Stampalibera.it», «Messinaora .it», «Messina Oggi», «Il Cittadino di Messina», «ReteMessina.it, «La Gazzetta Messinese», «Messina in diretta», «Messina Ora», «Messina7», «Messinawen.eu». There is also a valid bimonthly online magazine from Messina, directed by Roberto Sciarrone: «VerbumPress» Periodical of Culture and Society of the International Association VerbumlandiArt.
We cry, in short with one eye, as our ancestors said, especially considering the very small number of readers in Messina, but we cannot help but regret the richness and variety of newspapers and magazines of past years: think of «La Tribuna of the South» (still active in 1962)according to daily newspaper of the city, to the Messina editorial office of «L’Ora» of Palermo, an opposition newspaper active until 1992, to «Don Giovanni», a sporting, satirical, social and artistic newspaper (born in 1931 and still alive in the 1960s), to «Pagnocco», a quarterly review of culture and information, active between 2003 and 2010, of which Giuseppe Cavarra and Felice Irrera were authoritative editors, and at the first «Centonove», an opposition magazine born in 1993 and drowned, in 2016, in a sea of complaints, lawsuits, bankruptcy sentences, etc.
Of course, in the apathetic city of the Strait, there is a disheartening political and cultural monotony: the few voices of opposition come – to remain on the field of journalistic communication – from some online newspapers (“Il Nuovo Soldo” by Giuseppe Restifo and Cantiere Sociale is an example), which however do not have a very large audience.
And, on the other hand, it doesn’t seem like there are any alternatives within reach: those who still read are those over fifty, who are not very familiar with social networkswhere the young, who feed on network, they don’t read anything, but they type. There’s nothing to be happy about, in short: worse than suffocating situationof the Three suns by Liu Cxin.
In any case, Messina remains the city in which communication (literary, journalistic, television) languishes more than elsewhere. Consequently, Messina writers (quite a few) live mostly resigned to the provincial circuits of minor publishing; perhaps only theatrical communication manages to involve a still growing audience: the only hope…
Giuseppe Rando
