Journalists and Influencers, the Advertising Line: the Tobagi Foundation's Course at Glocal
At the Glocal festival in Varese the Walter Tobagi Foundation presented the work of the information, marketing and advertising commission of the Lombardy journalists' association: Rossella Verga explains the line between journalistic, sponsored and social content.
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At the Glocal festival in Varese the Walter Tobagi Foundation for journalism presented a course on the new forms of interference in the news: brand journalism, sponsored content, social media, influencers and algorithms. Explaining it is Rossella Verga, journalist and president of the Foundation, who retraces the year-long work of the information, marketing and advertising commission of the Lombardy journalists' association. The core issue is transparency: promotional content that takes the shape of an article without saying so removes one of the reader's tools for judging what they are reading. Hence the call to the new Code of Duties and the distinction between the journalist's role and that of people working on social media.
The problem is no longer just telling news apart from advertising: it is understanding how thin that line has become, and how far it risks eroding trust between those who write and those who read. That was the thread running through an event held at the Glocal festival in Varese and promoted by the Walter Tobagi Foundation for journalism, as reported by VareseNews on November 12. At its centre is a discussion of the new forms of interference testing the independence of the news: from brand journalism to sponsored content, and on to the role of social media, influencers and algorithms in spreading the news.
Explaining the sense of the work is Rossella Verga, a journalist and president of the Walter Tobagi Foundation, who retraced the path behind the event. The course presented at Glocal, she says, is the summary of about a year of work by the information, marketing and advertising commission set up within the Lombardy journalists' association. The aim was to tackle in an organised way a subject that, according to the source, is often known only in fragments, even though the rules are numerous and problematic situations are now frequent in newspapers, television, radio and above all on social media.
The first knot is the relationship between journalism and economic sustainability. Newsrooms work in a context where commercial pressure can grow stronger, and the line between editorial and promotional content risks becoming harder to recognise. Verga raises the point directly, saying that pressure from editors, marketing offices and companies is increasingly strong and that journalists are not always ready to say no or to set conditions. Knowing the rules thus becomes a tool of professional protection: a kind of compass for understanding how far one can go.
In terms of cases, the course examined concrete situations taken from reality and anonymised to avoid direct references to people or outlets. Among them are articles signed by journalists that may conceal undeclared commercial arrangements, or content driven by promotional logic that the reader cannot immediately grasp. The problem, the account goes, is not only the presence of an economic interest but how recognisable it is: advertising content disguised as an article without being identified as such removes one of the reader's essential tools for evaluating what they are reading.
The call to the rules goes through the profession's code of conduct. Enrico Parodi, a journalist and one of the course's speakers alongside Paolo Marelli and Marco Gentili, insists on the need to know the new Code of Duties for journalists, in particular article 22, indicated as the first reference to follow. Another delicate area is social media, where the separation between private life and professional role has become harder to draw, especially when a journalist uses personal profiles to talk about experiences, places or products. Verga's examples are everyday ones: a hotel, a restaurant, a pair of shoes worn on air.
From this comes a distinction between two trades that now share the same digital spaces. "We must not camouflage ourselves as colleagues who do other jobs, who are influencers," Verga observes, adding that journalists work within a system of professional and ethical obligations that does not coincide with that of people producing commercial or entertainment content. The reflection comes back to the relationship with the public: in an ecosystem where sources multiply and algorithms decide what is shown, trust is the most important and at the same time the most fragile asset, and for the Foundation's president it takes a moment to lose it and far longer to win it back.
It is worth being precise about what this account is: it is the coverage of a training event, quoting the person who led it, and not an investigation into specific cases. The source names no outlets or influencers involved and gives no number of participants. For those following the rules side, the network has covered the European Digital Fairness Act proposal and the duty to label sponsored content, while on online shopping there is the picture of this year's Black Friday offers.