Several times I have heard Pressenza referred to as ‘that blog’, ‘the Pressenza magazine’, the website and other inaccurate names that have made me reflect on the nature and manner in which Pressenza presents itself to its readers.
It is true that the world of information in the age of the web has become a hybrid and often confusing world and that it is not always easy to identify who is what.
It is also true that the ‘classical’ definitions of media have undergone transformations and contaminations.
But at the end of the day, I think it is good that Pressenza is what it is: a press agency for peace and nonviolence.
When we collectively started thinking about Pressenza in 2008, the words of Silo, the founder of Universalist Humanism, which Pía Figueroa, the first director of Pressenza, transcribed in her book Silo, the Master of Our Time, in the chapter entitled The Agency, resonated with us. He said that making a grandiose event like the World March for Peace and Nonviolence that was being prepared in those days was meaningless if it simply remained a beautiful thing among the participants without being able to spread to the rest of the people. “We must form an international press agency that can produce articles, videos, and photos that other agencies and media can take up”.
That agency was Pressenza, which first covered the March and then remained as a gift to all pacifists and nonviolents so that their initiatives could have a voice.
This is the main characteristic that Pressenza retains to this day: to be a media that can be taken up, quoted, and reproduced by other media. This is why, among other things, it has a Creative Commons 4.0 license, which is precisely a license that allows all content to be reproduced free of charge only by citing its source. This type of media is a news agency, i.e. a primary source of news. This way of working is well described in the book Nonviolent Journalism, the collective work of the Pressenza editors and the basic text for the seminars we organise with a view to training and informing more and more people about this way of doing journalism.
Obviously, over time Pressenza has produced, as a complex information reality, documentaries, radio broadcasts, podcasts, TV channels, training courses, books and manuals, but these derive from the trunk of a kind of information tree where the main source is the news, the communiqués, the interviews of the agency.
The agency has a specific, reproducible, descriptive, topical format that, for example, differentiates it greatly from the ‘magazine’ format with which Pressenza is sometimes confused. As a thematic press agency, Pressenza allows itself, more than other agencies, to host or reproduce opinions and editorials, inquiries, and interviews that delve into topical issues from which, in any case, it always starts to give readers and partners the keys to interpreting a world that is increasingly complex and articulated every day.
But the crucial element that we want to emphasise at this time, and where we want Pressenza to play its part to the fullest, is that part of society that fights for a better world and finds less and less space in the traditional media: Pressenza wants to give maximum voice to the whole composite and varied world of volunteers, committees, movements, associations that denounce the various forms of violence and propose new solutions: in this work for example lies the fact that Pressenza has a rich section of press releases generally published in full as they reach us from the social realities: this allows both partners and readers to tap without censorship or omission into the sources of the social realities in action. And this work is much appreciated by activists who relay it in their social networks, making it possible for initiatives to become known, to unite in common campaigns, to generate pieces of that new nonviolent, solidary, inclusive world to which we, with all of them, aspire.
Finally, let us remember that all this Pressenza does it for free, relying on a network of people who offer completely free and voluntary services of a high professional level, demonstrating in fact that another world is possible and that the word ‘work’ does not correspond to wages but to an action of transformation of the world. In a world that monetises everything, dominated by large financial speculation groups and economic blackmail, selfless and free action takes on inestimable value.
