The ninth edition of the International Journalism Festival has ended. For 5 days the town of Perugia hummed with the conversations of thousands upon thousands of speakers, attendees, citizens. Now the hotels are quiet and the big screens have been taken down. It’s time to look at the numbers and think about next year.
There were in total 279 sessions, all free admission, many with simultaneous translation – including debates, interviews, awards, book presentations, case histories, startups, new realities and publishing trends – held in 14 different venues in the historic town center of Perugia.
There were in total 623 speakers from 34 different countries, over 2,500 accredited journalists, substantial attendee flows, over 170 thousand visits to the website (the English-language version registered an increase of 30%), 35 thousand views of the videos on the festival YouTube channel (15 thousand more than 2014), 363 thousand minutes during the 5 days.
360 videos were produced, including:
– 260 live sessions (immediately available on demand)
– 70 mini-episodes of webmagazine interviews
– 5 daily diary pills
All sessions in ten different venues (seven more than last year) were broadcast simultaneously on the festival website in live streaming.
The most successful sessions were the panel with Edward Snowden (on Friday 17 April) and the conversation with Chef Rubio and Zerocalcare (on Saturday 18 April), both with around 3,500 views between live streaming and on demand.
The Gazebo session (at 22.30 on Friday 17 April), broadcast live also on the website of repubblica.it, recorded 150 thousand views.
Twitter: the #ijf15 hashtag produced about 56 thousand tweets from 15 to 19 April, from about 11,200 different users (on 5 continents) with over 500 thousand retweets.
Tweet peak reached: 74 per minute. The #ijf15 hashtag was among the trending topics for all five days, not only in Italy but also in Switzerland and Canada. The @journalismfest account gained about 1,000 followers from 15 to 19 April.
The most shared tweet was the “meme” with the quotation by Edward Snowden which got about 34 thousand impressions, more than 210 retweets, and was embedded more than 120 times.
During the keynote speech held by Jeff Jarvis (on Saturday 18 April) the #ijf15 hashtag recorded a peak of 1,500 tweets in 30 minutes.
Facebook: there were 420 thousand views of festival content, with 15 thousand ‘likes’, comments and shares during the 5 days.
Special mention to the 250 volunteers, coming from all over the world, who were fully and enthusiastically engaged in the organizational effort.
The tenth edition of the festival will take place in Perugia from 06 to 10 April 2016. The official hashtag is #ijf16.