The information menu of Italians is quite rich and diverse. Accertamenti Diffusione Stampa, a company that certifies the circulation data of the print content published in Italy, provides data on 62 daily newspapers, 41 weeklies, 51 monthlies, and 2 free presses active throughout Italy. Among the top fifteen for print and digital circulation, six are national, five operate at a regional or local level, three are sports media, and one focused on economic content (PrimaOnline, 2020a).
RAI has three mainstream national television newscasts, one on a local level (with offices in each region), two all-news channels (one devoted to sports), and three mainstream national radio newscasts. Additionally, in the 2019–2020 season, a total of 28 in-depth information programmes and magazines and two journalistic inquiry programmes were broadcast on the three RAI channels. The private sector has several programmes:
- Mediaset has three mainstream national television newscasts and one all-news channel, a total of four in-depth news programmes on its three networks in the 2019/2020 season;
- La7 has one mainstream national television newscast and nine in-depth news programmes in the 2019–2020 season;
- and Sky has two all-news national television newscasts, one devoted to sports and 20 private radio stations broadcast newscasts.
As far as consumption is concerned, Censis-Ucsi (2018) reports a gap between television and radio on one side – which seems to compensate for the decline in traditional users with an increase in online and mobile users – and newspapers on the other. In the latter case, in the face of the constant decline in sales in the print sector, the online sector sees growth in general information portals. A very broad and rapidly evolving context marks online information. Among the first 15 online information brands indexed by Audiweb (PrimaOnline, 2020b), nine are online versions of traditional newspapers and magazines (including la Repubblica and Corriere della Sera, but also Il Fatto Quotidiano, which has a radical division between offline and online newsroom), four are native online information sites and apps (including Fanpage), and two are online versions of all-news television channels (one by Mediaset, the other by Sky). Agcom (2018c) states:
Italians access online information mainly through so-called algorithmic sources (especially social networks and search engines), consulted by 54.5 percent of the population, while there is less use of editorial sources (websites and applications of traditional and native digital publishers). Moreover, 19.4 percent of the population indicates an algorithmic source as the most important within their information diet. The importance accorded to search engines and social networks stands out as the third and fourth most important source of information for information, considering all media (classic and online).
