The way we gather reflects our industry's blind spots

Recently, I attended the International Journalism Festival in Perugia – or at least part of it before catching a bug. The experience, brief as it was, highlighted a tension I've been wrestling with throughout my work at Gazzetta: the gap between journalism's ideals and its institutional realities.

Perugia embodies both what's inspiring and troubling about our industry's gathering spaces. The setting itself is invigorating – practitioners from around the world exchanging ideas against the backdrop of a beautiful Italian town on sunny spring days. It's easy to momentarily forget the systemic challenges we face back home.

What made Perugia valuable was the cross-pollination of different journalism worlds. It was noticeable how the three I happen to be part of brought their best attributes (and leaving their parochialisms behind):

Colleagues working in American newsrooms and academia brought their infectious entrepreneurial mindset, a welcome contrast to the often tiresome culture of personal branding that can dominate their world.

Those from European media traditions shared their deep commitment to civic values and public service, without the false comforts and constraints of hierarchical rigidity that so often limit innovation in their institutions.

And colleagues working in East and Southeast Asian media contexts always bring an unrivaled down-to-earth pragmatism and camaraderie, that thrives when freed from the irrational paternalism that often characterizes the power dynamics in many media organizations there.

Seeing these strengths without their accompanying systemic limitations creates moments of genuine possibility – glimpses of what could be.

Yet this polished version of Italy we all get to experience sits at odds with most people's lived reality. It did feel a bit like the White Lotus gathering of journalism, at least in the donor space. ("I just don't think at this age I'm meant to live an uncomfortable life.")

There's a risk of social conditioning here: another generation of journalists learning that trickle-down schmoozing with gatekeepers and circulating among the same conference crowd represents success and progress. This illusion partly explains why recent cuts in US government funding have been so devastating for many in international media – suddenly forced to reassess the perceived value of their work and socialization (myself included). Europeans replicating this pattern at smaller scale do so at their own peril.

This disconnect between ideals and reality has led me to Musa al-Gharbi's "We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite." The book examines how people like him or me, and likely you, are "symbolic capitalists who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction."

Al-Gharbi points out that "symbolic capitalists are hypocrites," but adds that "everyone's a hypocrite, almost by necessity. Moral principles tend to be austere, categorical, and unchanging while the world we navigate is full of ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, contingency and dynamism."

The hypocrisy lies in the system we've created that pursues democratic values while reinforcing exclusive access and gatekeeping.

Consider the paradox of the journalism festival itself: public panels about information access and democracy, with the real influence-building and opportunity-finding happening during private side gatherings that most practitioners will never access.

We risk perpetuating an ecosystem where career advancement often depends on being visible to the right gatekeepers in the right settings – quite the contradiction for a field claiming to serve broad public interests.

Of course, some networking is inevitable and valuable. The path forward isn't denying the benefits we receive from these systems (we all appreciate both the professional validation and the aperitivo).

Rather, it's acknowledging these contradictions while deliberately working to create more accessible spaces for journalism development. I was inspired when Cristian Lupsa told me about his approach to the Power of Storytelling festival in Bucharest:

He shared how he organized randomized dinner table pairings of participants to ensure people who would be unlikely to connect in typical networking scenarios could meet and share ideas.

We need more intentional design like this that disrupts the usual patterns of who gets to talk to whom.

My work at Gazzetta has been focused on reconceptualizing what media ventures are built for – moving beyond just functional information delivery to the psychological and emotional dimensions that actually sustain audience relationships. Perhaps we need a similar reconceptualization of our professional gatherings.

By leaving our self-affirming and self-selecting bubbles when we can, we get to explore the world in its greater complexity and see much more opportunity, rather than getting further bogged down in the ineffective group think that remains so comically pervasive.

In the words of George Orwell: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." This applies to myself just as much.