Il manifesto joins Italian journalists strike

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Today, we too – a newspaper without bosses – are going on strike. We are joining the day of struggle decided by the Italian journalists’ union against publishers who refuse to recognize the value of journalistic work and think they can offload the weight of the crisis onto editorial staff.

Tomorrow, November 29, we will not be on newsstands; you will not find a new edition of our podcast Una Mattina, and today the website will not be updated. The collective contract for which the strike has been called doesn’t have significant effects for us; in no even would we be applying the rules proposed by employers that penalize new hires. We are a cooperative; we do not have a publisher to strike against, and by stopping work we create inconvenience for our readers and damage only ourselves economically.

Nonetheless, after extensive discussion in our assembly, we decided to strike anyway.

We always take strikes very seriously. The front page of the first issue of il manifesto as a daily newspaper, almost 55 years ago, was dedicated to a strike. Recently, we happened to trade barbs with the confederal union because it was slow to organize a strike against the Israeli massacres in Gaza. When the decision finally came, on October 3, we went on strike while still working, in order to continue reporting on the Freedom Flotilla, to which we donated our wages for the day. But today is different. We are not stopping out of a form of solidarity with other journalists; we are doing it because the deep reasons that lie behind this strike go far beyond the renewal of the labor contract – which has been delayed for nine years – and we identify with them.

The way in which the owners of newspapers, radio and TV stations and websites are conducting negotiations is itself the clearest demonstration of the devaluation of journalistic work. The sector has already been heavily downsized for many years under the blows of certain types of technological innovation that the owners have used as a tool to plunder both user data and workers’ incomes.

Entire newsrooms replaced by news gathering on social media, rampant precariousness and starvation wages are now the norm. The authors of their own misfortune, publishers have done nothing but tie themselves to economic models of total dependence on the dominance of Big Tech. The crisis has spiraled more and more, and Artificial Intelligence is now dealing what might be the final blow. Meanwhile, media ownership has become concentrated in few hands, and the conflicts of interest of publishers of circumstance whose primary business is not media are hardly noticed anymore.

And the capacity for providing a critical account of reality has been greatly reduced – something the current right-wing majority can only be satisfied with, given its close ties with many publishers and the favorable attitude towards it among almost all the others. What the government’s idea of journalism is, after all, can be seen in the Prime Minister’s attitude, for whom even Trump is too friendly towards the press.

Nonetheless, forms of journalistic resistance, investigative capacity and non-aligned narratives are flourishing in the shadow of the great concentrations of power, online and not only. And we are among those resisting – we can count on the support of our readers, which is growing so much that il manifesto is itself a small case study against the backdrop of the crisis of Italian media.

Against the threats that repeat like clockwork every year, we claim with our heads held high the right to public funding for cooperatives and non-profit newspapers, as is done against market distortions in the main European countries and wherever it is understood that good information is a common good. Especially in a time of world wars that are fought by spreading fake news and killing real journalists.

For all these reasons, we are joining today’s strike – something we have not always done in the past, precisely because we have no interest in supporting corporate platforms. But we are at a critical point for all journalists, whose work has much to do with the quality of Italian democracy.

Our strike is twice independent. It’s not connected with the fight against a boss, which we don’t have, and we decided it in full freedom as an expression of our independence as workers and comrades of our cooperative.

We will suffer the cost, and for this we turn to you, who can show solidarity with us in a simple way: by subscribing – to whichever plan you want – on the day of the strike. We’ll be back tomorrow.

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Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-nostro-sciopero-indipendente on 2025-11-28