The Apocalypse, with a Pinch of Salt

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In 1540, Pope Paul III revoked an arrangement under which the people of Perugia, a city in what is now central Italy, had been allowed to buy salt from suppliers outside of the papal states, within which the pope exercised a monopoly. “The price of salt nearly doubled [and] Peruginis, already contending with a bad harvest, did not take it well,” Vittoria Traverso wrote for Atlas Obscura in 2018; the pope said he needed the extra tax money to fight heretics, but locals suspected he’d use the money corruptly and mounted an armed resistance. To this day, bread in Perugia tends to be baked without salt, a fact that many residents interpret as “a continuation of a fierce act of rebellion” and that chimes “with the Perugian’s fiercely rebellious and anticlerical reputation,” Traverso wrote. The story is, apparently, told often to visitors, in bakeries and beyond; my girlfriend heard a version of it in a nearby tourist office just last week.

Perugia still has a strong food culture, even if, these days, it’s less associated with salt than fine chocolate, pungent truffle, herby pork, and other indulgences. It’s a visually indulgent place, too—almost like an AI rendering of a beautiful Italian town—with a long central street, bedecked with resplendent old buildings, eventually opening out onto a balcony with views of rolling hills punctuated by towers; Assisi (a town with modern-day papal associations) glimmers like a jewel set into a nearby hillside. Into this setting, last week, strode journalists from all over the world, distinguishable from the locals if not by their lanyards and laptops, then by their natty trainers and shirt-jackets, myself very much included. The juxtaposition was slightly uncanny; as one attendee put it to me, this seemed like the sort of place you’d go for an anniversary break, not a major journalism festival. (While I did the festival, my girlfriend did the tourism; she’d recommend taking a boat on the nearby Lago Trasimeno, but not trusting the online timetable.) By day, we ducked out of a beating April sun and into panel discussions in impossibly beautiful theaters, where we asked questions that were really more of a comment. By night, we ate extravagant dinners then swarmed outside the handsome Hotel Brufani, where we swilled negronis and discussed The Apocalypse.

This was the nineteenth edition of the International Journalism Festival, an impeccably organized and free-to-attend annual gathering of the world’s media, but it was my first time in attendance; I thus can’t judge the vibe against prior years, but this time, there was abundant talk of there not being enough money to go around, of contracts canceled (be it by the US government or Big Tech), and, of course, Donald Trump, the rising threat of autocracy trailing in his wake, and just how bad things might get. I heard secondhand reports of US journalists wanting to pull up stakes and move to Europe—though a young Italian journalist asked me how they might go about moving in the opposite direction. (Indeed, the rolling hills are not always greener on the other side; Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister, is hardly a friend of the traditional media, as Sacha Biazzo has reported for CJR, and is ideologically proximate to Trump. As it happens, Meloni is visiting Trump this week to talk tariffs. Whiplash changes to advantageous trade arrangements, rising prices—some things never change.)

The anxiety of this moment for the world’s media came across in the festival’s packed program of panels, which bore titles like “Journalism in exile amid rising autocracies,” “Journalists under fire,” and “The Muskification of American media” (and this was just on Thursday). The first panel I attended—in a huge church with a back wall that fell away into a broad skylight—was about how “Silicon Valley’s AI emperors are reshaping reality,” and drew on a new podcast, from Coda Story and Audible, about the tech oligarchy’s “capture of journalism, labor, culture, and creativity” (not to mention their plans to live forever and fuse humanity into a hive mind). One of the hosts—Christopher Wylie, best known as the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower—admonished journalists for covering tech titans through the lens of the products they create, rather than the “underlying fascism” of their worldview. The other, Isobel Cockerell, spoke about how her base, in Rome, might seem an odd place to be working as a tech journalist but is actually “fascinating” given the Vatican’s unique perspective on AI. “The Catholic Church has always known how to harness technology and spectacle to inspire faith in a higher power; they were the Silicon Valley of their age, in a way,” she said. In a recent statement warning that humanity is in danger of worshipping AI as a god, Cockerell saw “the old religion coming out to do battle with the new one.” Anticlerical, indeed.

Plenty of panels dived into other pressing challenges to global press freedom at the moment, from Ukraine to the Middle East. Not that these were uniformly apocalypsey; there were at least three sessions analyzing what appears to be a broadly hopeful moment in Syria following the stunning collapse of the Assad regime last year. There were also sessions digging into big stories at something of a remove from the front lines of global geopolitical conflict; at least two reflected on lessons from the media’s coverage of the horrifying case of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman who was drugged and raped by her husband and dozens of other men. Then there were the sessions addressing the big philosophical questions about journalism, which might feel particularly resonant at this moment of existential doubt for the industry but are ultimately perennial; questions like “Who is mainstream media now?” and “What is journalism for?” (Imagine being stupid enough to try answering the latter.) One panel that I attended had the title “All journalists are content creators: it’s time for us to embrace that.” I left unconvinced that all journalists actually are content creators—as understood in the modern information ecosystem, even if they are literally—but heartened to hear that big thinkers in the industry aren’t willing to cede that ecosystem and are working out how to build an infrastructure to support the ongoing demand for fact-based journalism within it. (Johnny Harris, a journalist who is massively popular on YouTube and is growing out a team to support his work, had perhaps the quote of the festival for me: “The other day I was talking to somebody…and he’s like, You keep talking about your business and you’re describing a media company. And I’m like, Oh. I guess we’ve created a media company.”)

Indeed, I left the conference as a whole less anxious about this scary moment for journalism than inspired by the breadth of creativity and resilience I encountered in the face of it. (Okay, maybe equal parts anxious and inspired. At least somewhat inspired.) I caught up with journalists—like Ben Hallman, whose health news site, The Examination, I’ve written about for CJR—who are plugging away doing vitally important accountability reporting, albeit, often, below the toplines of the news cycle. And I had the chance to meet journalists whose dignity and perseverance in the face of authoritarian repression I’ve long admired from afar. Probably my favorite session I attended addressed the insidious and under-covered global spread of “foreign agent” laws as a means of criminalizing journalism (a topic I’ve also written about in this newsletter) and humanized it via the presence of Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and dual US and Russian citizen who was jailed in Russia until she was freed as part of a prisoner swap last year. “At this stage of life, I don’t like the word ‘hope,’ though we have to use it,” Kurmasheva said from the stage, during comments about the Trump administration’s recent push to gut RFE/RL (which RFE/RL is fighting in court). “I like ‘strategy’ and I like ‘planning.’ When there is no strategy, hope is kinda useless.” At the end of the session, Caoilfhionn Gallagher, a lawyer who works on press freedom issues, rose in the audience and paid tribute to Kurmasheva and others who could easily have gone to ground but instead showed up at the festival to advocate for those still behind bars. It was a comment not a question that everyone could applaud.

The salt uprising of 1540 was ultimately crushed by the forces of the papacy. And it’s far from clear that the legacy of resistance to arbitrary authority is the reason that Perugians make bread without salt; some researchers have suggested that it’s an urban legend, one that may have been born much later, in the 1800s, when Italy was unified. As one of those researchers told Atlas Obscura, however, it’s a “good story.” And it endures.

Other notable stories:

• Yesterday, the White House barred journalists from the Associated Press from attending an Oval Office news conference with Trump and Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador—even though a judicial order banning the administration from punishing the AP over a coverage dispute is now in effect. The AP’s David Bauder has more details (and I wrote about the case in yesterday’s newsletter). During the news conference, Bukele told reporters that he has no intention of sending back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man whom the Trump administration has admitted to erroneously deporting to the country. On MSNBC, Symone Sanders Townsend and April Ryan criticized the reporters who were in the room for waiting too long to ask a direct question about Garcia’s case. 

• Also yesterday, we learned that the administration is planning to ask Congress to rescind funding that it previously approved for foreign aid projects and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees both NPR and PBS, in a move that could ultimately see Republicans follow through on their recent threats to defund those broadcasters; NPR and PBS get a relatively small proportion of their budgets from public funds compared with counterparts in other countries, but a cut would nonetheless hit hard, especially in local markets. The so-called rescission package needs only a simple majority of votes in both chambers to pass, but the Senate rejected a similar move in Trump’s first term, and the request will expire after forty-five days.

• Earlier this month, G/O Media—the private-equity-backed media company that is in the process of shedding its editorial assets—sold Quartz, which it had acquired in 2022, to Redbrick, a Canadian software firm. The deal resulted in most of Quartz’s staff being laid off, and Zach Seward, the cofounder, wrote in a subsequent blog post that the site is now a “zombie brand”; he accused G/O of destroying Quartz and suggested that the new owner seems “mostly interested in the email list” the site has built up. Now Jim Spanfeller, G/O’s CEO, has hit back at Seward, insisting that the brand has an “extremely bright” future; Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt has more.

• For CJR, Megan Greenwell profiled Press Pass NYC, a small nonprofit that aims to seed student publications at under-resourced public schools around New York. “Research shows that high schoolers who are involved in journalism earn higher GPAs and ACT scores than their peers and perform better in college English classes,” Greenwell writes. But journalists “tend to think of the primary value of a news outlet as being for the public, not for its staff,” and beneficiaries of the program are “vexed by a challenge known to most news publishers: growing a readership.”

• And Gayle King, of CBS, went to the edge of space yesterday as part of an all-female flight organized by Blue Origin, the startup owned by Jeff Bezos. King was awed by the experience: “You look down at the planet and you think, That’s where we came from?” she said. “To me it’s such a reminder about how we need to do better, be better.” Amanda Hess, a critic at the New York Times, was less impressed. “The flight’s roster seems to have been assembled with the energy of an American Girl doll collection,” she wrote. If it proves anything, “it is that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most decadent spoils alongside the world’s wealthiest men.”

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