Hallin and Mancini (2004) highlight how a low level of professionalism characterises the Mediterranean model. The co-existence of such a low level of professionalism with a highly selective organisational form (regarded as a “guild”) constitutes an Italian anomaly. The Order of Journalists regulates access to the profession, defining who can (and cannot) become a journalist through a highly selective process based on years of paid work into newsrooms and a final examination. This means that Italian journalists approach the professional path inside newsrooms, rather than through education.
Nevertheless, in recent years, university education has become more common and relevant for new professionals. 68 per cent of journalists have a higher education degree. This could be university degree, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree (first or second level ), or PhD, mainly in the field of Political, Social, and Communication Sciences.
Today’s diversity of journalistic styles and models (long-form journalism, data journalism, journalism based on native advertising, and so forth) is creating a more fragmented Italian journalistic culture, whereby traditional values live side by side with newer ones. This situation produces mixed results, where paths of professionalisation may be very different. For example, on one side, forms of data journalism or crowdfunding experiments are multiplying and prove daily to be highly transparent (see Porlezza & Splendore, 2016, 2019), but on the other side, transparency does not seem to be the core issue for many journalists and newsrooms (Bentivegna & Marchetti, 2018).
One aspect that – according to the president of FNSI – is evolving positively is the journalist’s capacity of self-organising and creating forms of solidarity in cases of conflict. In November 2017, a journalist was attacked with a headshot by a member of an extreme right-wing political force and a well-known family of the Ostia underworld. In January 2020, the attacker was convicted. The president of FNSI said:
The Higher Court, with an unprecedented sentence, recognised that that headshot did not only affect the individual journalist but also the right to report […]. This will allow us, in the future, to claim in a trial “harassment to the right to report” as an aggravating circumstance.
Finally, representatives of FNSI and the Order of Journalists (Equality Committee) have highlighted how younger professionals are expected to have many skills and competences – editing, writing, screen, and radio – and are requested to perform many tasks, though occupying precarious positions.
