Late within 2008, Marco Travaglio was asked by fellow journalist Massimo Fini to advertise the latter's newly founded magazine, La Voce del Ribelle, on the former's blog, voglioscendere.it, with the objective of gathering "a few hundred subscriptions". Thousands of people answered, allowing Fini's magazine to succeed. Because of this success, Travaglio started considering the idea of using his blog to launch a new newspaper, independent from public funding. The intention of publishing a new national newspaper was announced by Marco Travaglio on his blog, voglioscendere.it on 1 June 2009. The title il Fatto Quotidiano was chosen as a homage to journalist Enzo Biagi, who was purged from state televisionRAI at prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's request, and whose hugely successful daily ten-minute prime-time news commentary on Rai Uno, named Il Fatto, was removed from programming. The newspaper could not just be named "Il Fatto" because RAI, the Italian public broadcast vetoed it mentioning name ownership, even if its very management was the one who put it off the air. In June 2009, l'Antefatto, a promotional website, was set up containing information about subscription and the development of the project. The publisher stated he would not use the Italian state advertising and funding to run the newspaper but instead he would use only money from sales and market advertisements. The first issue, printed in 100,000 copies in addition to 32,000 subscriptions, was already sold out before 8:00 AM on 23 September, even though distribution was limited to the largest cities. As a consequence, the newspaper announced it would immediately double the number of copies and publish the first issue, free of charge, on the Internet.
Ownership
il Fatto Quotidiano is published by Editoriale Il Fatto S.p.A., an Italian company. The company regulation states that up to 70% of the shares can be owned by entrepreneurs, but no one of them can own more than 16% of the share capital, estimated in 600,000 euros. The remaining 30% of the shares is owned by the newspaper columnists. Therefore, no important choice can be made without the consent of the columnists as a 70% majority + 1 is needed to carry out decisions about the newspaper policy or editor election. The managing director is Giorgio Poidomani.
Format and circulation
il Fatto Quotidiano is printed in the compact format and full colour. It is distributed in Italy either by post and over 25,000 newsagents in the major Italian towns and regions. A significant fraction of the readership, about one fifth, is made out of subscriptions to the PDF version of the newspaper. The circulation of il Fatto Quotidiano was 113,000 copies on 25 December 2009. The paper had a circulation of 78,669 copies in 2010.
