Our summer reporter flies, sails, drives and walks across Europe, looking for stories about creativity in journalism. Second stop, Italy.

For years now I’ve been publishing articles for an Italian magazine, without knowing if anyone reads them. Do my stories end up unread in some Sicilian tomcat’s litter box or does someone cut them out and save them in a folder marked ‘interesting articles’? I don’t have a clue. Hordes of journalists, just like me, don’t have any interaction with their audience. And it’s even less common for them to exchange thoughts about their work with their colleagues, or make suggestions for one another. A good idea, you keep to yourself. You work on it in silence, haunted by the fear that someone else will beat you to it. And yet, in 2010, things can be different.

The civilian bombardment
As it turns out, readers really do exist. That came to light not too long ago, when they appeared from each other’s shadows. Suddenly readers turned out to be writers themselves, with creative ideas and interesting knowledge. They broke their silence with a bombardment of blogs, tweets and websites. Everybody discovered the photographer or journalist inside themselves.

This presented the existing media with a bit of a problem. What to do with this torrent of new colleagues? Do we ignore them because they’re not real journalists? Or do we involve them in our work, because it might just end up with something interesting? Here in Italy, one magazine radically chose to walk the latter path: COLORS magazine

The Calico Colours of Benetton
The subtitle of COLORS is “A magazine about the rest of the world”. And it’s true. Even if it takes a day to reach the editorial staff in the Fabrica complex in some north Italian hamlet, COLORS’ gaze reaches out to the smallest village on the other side to the world. And what’s going on out there is just as interesting as what’s going on at home, they think. That’s why every issue has its own theme which can always be interpreted globally, whether it’s linked to topicality or of a more cultural nature. ‘The sea’ is one of those themes, or ‘Money’.

Not just Italians read COLORS, the audience is a motley collection of nationalities, spread out over more than 40 countries. That’s why every issue is printed in four languages: English, French, Spanish and Italian. It’s not surprising that one of the founders of this magazine was Oliviero Toscani, the famous Italian photographer who made those controversial campaigns for Benetton in the 90’s. Those posters reflected that same international and social involvement and that same daring style that also marks COLORS.

Today COLORS is a part of Fabrica, the communication research centre of the Benetton Group. Together with the creative young minds of the other departments of Fabrica (design, advertising and music), the COLORS editors work in an astonishing building complex in the middle of the silent Italian landscape at the outskirts of Treviso.

Crowdsourcing
What sets COLORS apart from other magazines is that from that open vision, they seek collaboration on all possible levels. With their readers, with foreign journalists, with artists and videographers of Fabrica and with NGO’s. That’s how the magazine brings to practice what you hear about all the time when they’re talking about new developments in the media: crowd sourcing, pro-am, networked and collaborative journalism. All terms that have to do with the collaboration between professionals and amateurs, between media makers and media users and between journalists amongst each other. A couple of examples of the creative results that arose from this.

Crafts for death row convicts
NOTEBOOK Ever since 2006, COLORS sends out empty copies of their magazine to people all over the world, along with an invitation to fill it up themselves, totally freely, and send it back to the redaction. Angela Quintavalle, an enthusiastic young woman who guides me around Fabrica, shows me a few of the 2000 homemade magazines that have returned up until now.

“NOTEBOOK arose from collaboration with Reporters sans Frontières,” she explains about the project. “Together we wanted to stand up for freedom of opinion and expression and that’s how we came to the idea to give a voice to people we’d normally never hear from. So we invited people from countries where freedom is under pressure, like China, Iran and North-Korea. But death row convicts, teenage mothers, psychiatric patients and artists have shown us what’s going on inside themselves just as well. The creative diversity of the results is enormous.”

The most beautiful NOTEBOOKS were on display in the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006 and later also in other cities like Tokyo, Berlin and Milan. One of the participants of the NOTEBOOK project is Cesare Bignotti, an unconventional graphic designer, in his own words. He says about his participation in the project, “Right after I had sent in my first copy, COLORS contacted me. They were impressed with my drawings and wanted to show them on expositions and use them in a book about the NOTEBOOK project. To me it was a lot of fun being able to show my work internationally and since then I regularly work with COLORS.”

Not just through the NOTEBOOK project, but also through their own website, COLORS is always making new contacts. On COLORS lab, everyone can participate in the editorial process by uploading their own pictures, illustrations and suggestions. That process lasts for two months, until the printed copy appears with the best contributions of the readers to the website. They get paid for that by the way, dependant of age and experience.

“For our last issue ‘Dance’, a reader had uploaded a picture and a video clip entitled ‘Sissy Bounce’”, Angela Quintavalle tells us as an example. “It got our attention and so we bumped into a new street dance from New Orleans, which is mostly popular among gays and transvestites. We decided to send out one of our foreign contributors and the next issue will definitely feature it.”

Networking, but fun
Foreign contributors. Another source that supplies COLORS of fresh input. They have over 200 of them, spread out over 40 different countries. It’s a hybrid network of creative talents, ranging from professional photographers to students in journalism and video. Erica Fusaro, employee of Fabrica, says, “It’s fantastic to have such a worldwide system of collaborators. It expands the possibilities we have enormously. If we want to make a story about a desolate fisherman’s village in South Korea, we contact our local photographer or journalist and make up a plan. Because of years of collaboration, they often know exactly what we’re looking for. But it also happens the other way around. They call us when they run into something interesting in their surroundings.” This way, a continuous exchange of creative ideas arises, which should be the envy of every magazine that mainly hunts its stories on the internet.

Exotically experimental
Only 10 people work at the permanent redaction in Treviso. They’re all younger than 30, most of them even younger than 25. Hardly any Italians here as well, but rather an exotic mix of nationalities. All of them went through the difficult admission procedures and stay here for a few years, until new youth will take their place.

It all fits right into the style of Fabrica, the communication research centre of Benetton. “Youths often feel strongly connected to the world. They’re curious and open and find it exciting to work interdisciplinary. That’s exactly what Fabrica’s looking for,” explains Erica Fusaro. For complicated projects the members of the redaction ask for help from the young experts in other Fabrica departments. Especially now that COLORS is busy experimenting with new technologies, like Augmented Reality, working in multidisciplinary teams is an every day reality.

The Spanish journalist Laia Abril writes in an e-mail, “For the last issue with the theme ‘The Sea’, we’ve continuously collaborated with Arts Directors, image editors and interactive designers. That interaction sometimes makes the work complex and heavy. Everything has to happen at the same time and in concurrence with each other. That’s very different from everybody making their own piece of work and assembling it in the end. But the extra effort is more than worth it when you see what interesting, beautiful and surprising results it delivers. Only with an intensive collaboration can you achieve something like that.”

Your summer reporter is convinced of that. A magazine like COLORS shows a world of creative opportunities opening up, if you just open yourself up to others. Whether they be readers, companies, experts or amateurs, every group has its own knowledge and imagination. And if you dare to tap into that rich source, creativity will spontaneously come welling up.

Follow Maria Groot through Zomerreporter.nl.

Translation: Steven Jagers