Outside the box. The migrants’ journey as an attempt of slow journalism in Italian mainstream

The paper aims to examine the media representation of the migration phenomena by focusing on the “journey” dimension. This is to stand out from the tendency, common to the media representation of migration but sometimes also to the studies that deal with it, to privilege the emergency dimension as the main interpretative key of the phenomenon. Two are the case studies that will be examined for this purpose. The first represents a real media “counter-narrative” carried out by the TV show “Gazebo”, through the serial narration of the story of Naji and Ola, two Syrian migrants heading to Germany. The second, which instead represents the opportunity for a crowdfunded reportage on the journey of migrants to be part of the mainstream media agenda, is the work that Valerio Nicolosi is currently completing, entitled “Frontiere, le vie per l’Europa”. Through the analysis carried out, the chance for the Italian journalism to adopt the model of the so-called “slow journalism” will be tested, and, ultimately to implement a real process of redefinition of the migrants’ representation in the mainstream media landscape.