On February 7 AOL announced its plan to buy the Huffington Post for $315m. The new group will have a combined base of 117 million unique visitors a month in the United States and 270 million around the world. It is the largest merger in American business history.

Reflecting on the Huffington Post's story, Marco Renzi, on the Italian website LSDI, asked some provocative questions about the Italian situation of online-only experiences.

The Huffington Post was born in 2005 as Internet-only news site with an initial investment of one million dollars. Six years later, the site now employs more than 200 people and reaches 25 millions visitors every month, also thanks to a really wide network of bloggers and contributors.

"There would be similar examples in Italy... but the structural differences are so evident that rather than provide hope, they provoke outrage and bafflement", Renzi wrote, "What publishing company would nowadays invest one million euro in a blog?"

A wave of online-only sites has started to hit Italy, following an international trend and new protagonists appear in the Italian news panorama.

Amongst the pioneers there are the newspaper Affari Italiani, launched in 1996, and lavoce.info, online from 2002 and mainly focused on economic news and analysis.
On April 2010 the international Internet holding Banzai launched Il Post, which declared that it took as an example the Huffington Post itself. And recently, two new news website were launched, Lettera43 and Linkiesta.

Despite these experiences, Italy experience a significant delay in investing in online-only news enterprises. At the same time, mainstream publishers have often been timid in finding a really new approach to the web, simply confining themselves to bringing their traditional know-how to Internet, without creating a truly new fully integrated newsroom for digital content.

The Editors Weblog spoke to some protagonists of the Italian online news world, asking what they think about the present and the future of the digital publishing industry in Italy.

Paolo Madron, editor in chief of Lettera43, underlined that even in the US it was not traditional publishers who fully seized the opportunity of the Web first. The Huffington Post and Tina Brown's Daily Beast both born from actors external to mainstream news publishers. "We could say that the Web is a matter of outsiders" he said, citing the French examples of Rue89, created by former journalists of Liberation and Slate.fr, created by former Le Monde editor in chief Jean-Marie Colombani.

In his opinion, the Web is not necessarily suited for mainstream publishers. And this seems particularly true for Italy.

A study from Federazione Italiana Editori Giornali (FIEG), the Italian Federation of Newspapers Publishers, however, showed that for the period 2006 - 2008 "amongst the news sites, the ones published by traditionally printed newspapers were the most viewed".

Michele Polo, of lavoce.info, and Professor of Political Economics at Bocconi University of Milan, pointed out that in the beginning, print newspapers' publishers found it hard to recognize the possibilities that the Web was providing in reporting. Also, regarding the internal organization of newsroom, there was a sort of spill over from the traditional job to the digital one, without a proper preparation for this transition. The news sites remained, at least at the beginning, on the back-burner behind the printed paper.

"Italy is generally behind on several fronts, especially regarding web-related things", commented Luca Sofri, editor-in-chief of Il Post. "There are some self-evident obstacles, first of all the fact that Italian is not so diffused and this reduced the numbers of users. However - Sofri said - there is a degree of cultural and technological backwardness, which is reflected in little attention toward the possibilities of the Web and of a modern and innovative news approach."

A recent study pointed out that the number of Italians who use the Internet to get informed is decreasing, while the main source of information remains TV.

Positive signals for the future of online news do exist, however. Lavoce.info launched in July 2002, with the aim of providing the public with analysis on complex economic policy issues of general interest. Despite the fact it covers mostly economic news (contributors are mostly from university professors), its readership is not confined to business specialists and it has also had success among the general public.

"We wanted to participate in the public debate and we thought that in the mainstream media there wasn't enough space for proper economic analysis", said Tito Boeri, Economics Professor at Bocconi University, Milan, and one of the founders of lavoce.

In Italy, as abroad, there was a steady demand for quality information, regarding general news and specialist business and economic information, he noted. "We have been a sort of forerunner, as after us other economists have created news site similar to lavoce, as VoxEu.org, or the French site Telos; the Dutch site Me Judice or the Spanish site Nada es Gratis." Even if their intended audience is economists as well as journalists specializing in economics, finance and business, they all share the same purpose of diffusing quality and proper information in the economic debate.

Michele Polo also noted that there are some sites which, even if they are not truly journalistic news sites, they do, however, have a degree of news content, like Dagospia, a political, society and culture website, in the style of Drudge Report, and bebbegrillo.it, the blog of Bebbe Grillo, a comedian, described by The New Yorker as a "combination of Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert: an activist and vulgarian with a deft ear for political satire". These kinds of sites, which aim to produce a sort of "counter-information" compared to the mainstream media - Polo noted - are always well-informed and up to date with current affairs news.

One of the most evident differences between Italy and abroad however is in the numbers of users. It maybe be hard to imagine, even given the due proportions, an Italian news website gaining the global success similar to that the Huffington Post has achieved.

Paolo Madron underlined that the $315m is a hyperbolic amount as it could be as much as 15 times more than the real vaule. It is a projection, as the $500m valuation of Facebook is. "The Web lends itself to the bubble effect. Anyway, if we bring the value back down to the earth, given the due proportion between the American and the Italian realities, we can imagine something similar also in Italy. We said mainstream publishers aren't exploring this market, so we should wait for an outsider", he argued.

Luca Sofri, on the other hand, has more doubt about the possibility for Italy to experience such a success. "Here at Il Post, which upholds its ethical and political ambitions, we think that margins exist to broaden readership which looks for quality as well as limiting costs so the operation could earns its living. This is an objective achievable today in Italy and this is the way we are working", he said.

Part of the decision to found an online-only news site in 2002, Boeri said, was not only the idea that the Web was bound to be the means of the future, but also the fact that it allows the launch of a new publication with a reasonably limited amount of money. "We wanted to be independent and Internet allowed us to be that", he said. (The website is financed by voluntary subscriptions).

The Huffington Post owes its success also to the collaboration, beside the newsroom, of several bloggers. Is this collaboration a key for success?

"I wouldn't say the Huff Post is just a bloggers' aggregator", said Madron. "They do have bloggers but they also have a strong editorial line. There is an editorial connotation underlying everything. It is always up to date with facts, no matter if it comes from reporters or bloggers. Its prerogative remains the fact to be a news site".

Bloggers are a heavyweight in the HuffPo fame, in Sofri's opinion. "The notoriety of Huff Post is also due to the huge number of pages they publish, and within these a lot come from contributors whom HP has asked to write a blog (myself included). It looks to quantity before quality and it seems to works", he said.

Blogs draw more audience, agreed Boeri. "For overcoming competition you need to offer something particular, an additional value in the over flooding mass of information available nowadays. We could probably increase our audience if we would have blogs, but we would definitely risk diminishing the level of quality of our coverage."

SITE NAME UNIQUE USERS
Corriere della sera 1.326.601
Il Post 27.915
Il Sole 24 Ore 281.750
La Repubblica 1.592.283
Lettera 43 21.995
La Stampa 358.744
Dagospia 84.803
Online audience - Daily average - January 2011 - Source: Audiweb

Sources: LSDI, L'Espresso, FIEG, The New Yorker