Signatures have always mattered for journalism. They matter for the readers, who can tell whether their favourite writers are on a certain edition of a newspaper. They also matter for journalists, who can acquire visibility and take pride in their work. The Economist, the one magazine which does not allow journalists to sign their articles, has always been seen as a different type of animal, a strange exception that only works because of its history and of its nature.

Lately, a different type of signature has started to matter in Italian journalism. As well as competing on the quality of writers' signatures, newspapers have started to compete on the number of readers' signatures they can collect on-line to support certain campaigns. This is true of newspapers on both the right and the left. A right-wing newspaper such as Libero has long collected signatures for a better school system and for the abolition of provinces. Similarly, the Berlusconi family-owned Il Giornale, has in the past collected signatures to promote change in Rai, which was seen as being too left-leaning.

A newspaper positioned on the centre-left of the political spectrum, La Repubblica, is now using this feature repeatedly. La Repubblica has collected signatures to defend press freedom in Italy as well as to defend women's dignity against certain expressions used by Berlusconi. It is now using them to promote a campaign against a law which would reduce the length of trials to an extent that, Repubblica says, many crimes would go unpunished. This last appeal is particularly interesting, as it was written by Roberto Saviano, the author of Gomorrah and one of the most well-known Italian writers. It therefore combines the traditional importance of having well-known authors signing the articles, with the more recent feature of collecting as many readers' signatures as possible.

That newspapers have now decided to acquire this new characteristic can be seen as a way to make the reader interact more with their newspaper, something which one would expect in the world of internet. However, it is also a consequence of their increased politicisation: newspapers want to influence the political debate and, to do so, they have to let politicians know that they have a solid base of consensus, too. Readership is an old-fashioned concept: the new  frontier of Italian journalism seems to show active readership, and signatures are the way to prove its weight.