On March 14th, our students met the investigative journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi, who held a lesson with the title "Giornalismo come guardiano della democrazia e legalità" (= journalism as guardian of democracy and legality). It has been a very impressive and interesting experience. Here are some pictures and reports written by some of our YEurope participants.

This is what Marta writes:

In an era in which social networks play an extremely important role in our lives, Emiliano Fittipaldi (currently working for the Italian magazine “L’Espresso”) has decided to go off the beaten track and work as an investigative journalist.

“My job is not easy and it requires efforts, but when you manage to make something change thanks to your articles, you realise that it was worth it” Fittipaldi  claims while giving some tips about how to become a journalist.

As he proceeds, he reveals that curiosity is the starting point of every good story, as a matter of fact, most of his successful articles were driven by his need to know more about something. Moreover he believes that in order to make a good story one has to be careful about his sources and to find documents that support what people say.

Having had the chance to meet such a determinate person was extraordinary and it helped me understand the difficulties that people have to face even when their only goal is to tell the world the truth.

And here is Angelica's report:

Giorgio's report focused on Fittipaldi's inquest about Vatican:

Emiliano Fittipaldi is an Italian journalist who came for a conference in our school. Since he was a child he was interested about old-style journalism, but nowadays because of the social media, do journalism is getting always harder.
His role’s exact definition is the investigation journalism, namely the one who searches inside other’s business looking for new scoops. And in fact recently he inquire about a rich party on the pope’s attic. He find out that the party was sorely expansive, and the Saint Venue paid it with the
Vatican’ bank money. Then he looked for newer information about the most important cardinals in Vatican.
He discovers that the cardinal George Pell was another one who took advantages from the Vatican’s Back. In fact he had been chosen from Pope Francis to improve the Great Vatican Economy Reform, but he paid for business class flights, an 8-millions-dollar house and he lend
some money to one of his Australian friend.
Fittipaldi went in Australia looking for new information about Pell instance. He detected a few documents about two girls rapes from Pell’s friend, and right that friend bought the silence of the two families. Unfortunately, now one girl died for overdose and the other one is one a wheelchair because of an accident happened when se was drunk.
Fittipaldi declaimed Pell and his friend and now they have to pay 30.000 for the two families, and furthermore Pell won’t be the Vatican cardinal anymore.

Ludovico remarks how important is doing investigative journalism today.

Wednesday 14 of March at the Cavour high school in Rome an important reporter named  Emiliano Fittipaldi of  the Espresso made a conference talking about modern journalism. This journalist is known because he has made an important inquest that discovered that the 3rd most important person in the Vatican abused children in  Australia and helped other priest to cover their accuses of paedophilia.  Fittipaldi opened the conference with a movie scene in which there was a discussion between Giancarlo Siani, an important journalist that made an investigation about the camorra in south of Italy,  and the director of his  newspaper. In this conversation they discussed about two types journalist, the “journalist” and the “journalist journalist “.  The first type reporter writes what the government thinks and wants to hear, instead the “journalist journalist “ investigates to uncover what the government or important people want to keep out of the public. Fittipaldi affirmed that nowadays at least in Italy most of the reporters left are the only “journalist “ stopping to do the most important task for their job that is to defend democracy investigating the authority in power . Most newspapers in Italy decided to stop doing scoops because often the journalist are sued by the person who they investigate on that asks them a huge reimbursement of money obliging the newspaper to stop the inquest. Fittipaldi talked about how in USA this problem was resolved by drawing up a low that impelled that if the person that asked the reimbursement of money lost the lawsuit they had to give 10%of the money that they demanded to the newspaper.  Fittipaldi talked also about the next generation that is less interested in journalism then the past and less informed. He considers this a very big problem because in this way it will be easier in the future for the government and the people with power  to do what they want for their interest and not for the citizens.  He also stated that the younger generations being less informed are more influenced by the fake news on Internet, so it is important and fundamental to invest in schools and culture.