Little things can add up, but the idea of using a Fiat 500 as a mobile newsroom is an interesting one.

Editor-in-chief of La Stampa Mario Calabresi says he draws on international journalism for his inspiration, but admits the Italian daily is not short of ideas of its own.

The home town paper of Turin, where WAN-Ifra’s World Editors Forum is to be held in June – and Calabresi is to be a speaker – tapped the local marque for the car to which a disproportionately large satellite dish has been attached.

Connected to a new integrated newsroom running EidosMedia’s Méthode, the little car mixes glamour with a working life and turned up to help with the red carpet coverage of the Venice Film Festival last September.

The ‘Web Car’ is a product of La Stampa’s MediaLab, a studio which acts as an incubator for innovation and a place to experiment with new ways of digital storytelling.

Apart from being a base for roving journalists, it provides a satellite-enabled wifi hotspot which could also be used in a natural emergency.

One of the paper’s innovations has been to have social media editors drawn from outside the organisation: “We decided to have temporary social media editors in rotation, who are not traditional journalists but rather are well known and recognised by online communities as credible and authoritative,” Calabresi says.

The paper’s fully integrated newsroom and commitment to ‘open journalism’ are another: “It is obvious now that the top-down approach where legacy media where the gatekeepers of news and information that they delivered to readers is no longer valid,” he says. “Now there is a need for exchange and sharing that is unprecedented.”



In an interview for WAN-Ifra’s World News Publishing Focus, Calabresi says he takes his inspiration from many places. “What I look at is the sustainability of the model: the ability to produce high-quality journalism matched with innovation and economic sustainability,” he said. “I find very interesting what Robert Thomson is doing at The Wall Street Journal. I admire the effort to change and innovate at the New York Times, as well as the tradition and innovation of the Financial Times. As for the energy and dynamism: India.”

He is set to speak in a session entitled ‘Editors’ evolution: are you in danger of becoming extinct?’ in which other participants will be Telegraph Media’s Jason Seiken, Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome editor Robyn Tomlin, Editor, Harvard University Bradlee professor of government and the press Thomas Patterson and David Boardman, Dean of Media and Communications at the USA’s Temple University.

The Editors Forum, World Newspaper Congress and World Advertising Forum are from June 9-11. Details from http://www.wan-ifra.org/torino2014