Who we are

Kritica.it went online on January 31st, 2025. We are, in terms of age, infants, or if you prefer, the slow-ripening fruit of decades of experience in journalism, communication, and political activism. We've lived everywhere with a sense of unease and great intolerance towards the unhealthy mechanisms of power that govern the world, and specifically the world of work and human relationships. We've lived almost always seeking escape routes and alternatives, to be able to do things differently.

Kritica is the space where this need becomes an action.

Let's take a critical look at the reality we define as “the physics of points of view”, because we are aware that power is a physical function. It responds to weights, strengths, speeds, levers, and so on. The problem of power is the problem par excellence. For this reason, we try to start from the most unexplored points of view. We were born during the genocide of the Palestinian people, and as a consequence of it. It is the prism that informs all our work. If most informers start from the press releases of the Israeli army, we start from our Palestinian authors: in just over a year we have built almost an entire basic newsroom in Gaza, We are the only Italian publication, and perhaps not just Italian, to have done so. While most gather the omnipresent voices of national politicians, we start with those who have something else to say; those who are recluse, under siege, or deprived of a guaranteed platform. While most recycle hearsay, we bring the dossiers, documents, and interventions that explain this era directly into the hands of our readers. providing full primary sources, translated into our language. If the majority continue to favour authorial signatures integrated into classist, racist and patriarchal hierarchies, we, without asking permission and without needing to set quotas, give space mainly to women, to young people, to people with migration backgrounds, to those living in the Global South, to neurodivergent people and to those living on the margins, partly by choice and partly by force.

Our editorial choices don't follow anyone's lead. If we get it wrong, we get it wrong on our own; if we get it right, the same applies.

All our work is free for those who read it. We do not believe in the philosophy of paywalls, subscriptions, or the exclusivity of a privileged relationship with the community. We do not want to turn a newspaper into a place of worship or identity. We want to offer food for thought, asserting the right and sometimes the necessity to disappoint our readers by bringing to their attention truths or arguments they might not like. We compensate our freelance contributors at the medium-high levels of the market, often giving them more than do publications a thousand or ten thousand times our size.

In exchange for our work, we ask for free participation. Funding Kritika is a gesture of democratic freedom and responsibility. You do it with what you can, when you can.. Readers are an integral and prominent part of the information ecosystem. If readers participate financially, the system is healthy. If they are happy to be fed by social media feeds, they are participating in a sick system.

At the head of Kritica is the person writing these lines, Federica D’Alessio, a journalist; a life, so to speak, of Outsider, a prolific producer of conflict, a stubborn worker of thought with no bourgeois aspirations, but with strong ambitions to see a finally just way triumph in its course during my lifetime, in the sense of equitable and of straight, to recognise the work and intellectual contribution of people, including yours. I worked for MicroMega, from which I distanced myself precisely because of sharp conflicts over the coverage of what was happening in Palestine; I collaborated with some online magazines such as The Estates-General, I have published articles for The Manifesto, D of the Republic, The Corriere – The 27th Hour. I won two awards for two different investigations: the Parco Majella Literary Prize in 2021 for an investigation into the grain supply chain, and the Luchetta International Prize for journalism on children's rights in 2022. For twenty years, I was primarily a political activist, under the illusion that militant journalism could also be free. It's not possible. This is why Kritika's journalism is clearly aligned, it is dedicated, but it does not intend to define itself as militant.

In a time when we are being pushed from various quarters to enlist ourselves in old and new doctrines and dogmas, Kritika cultivates the spirit of those who have sought “love and friendship not subject to a doctrine”. Federica's philosophical manifesto can be found, if you feel like reading it, in this article.
Thank you for being with us.

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