Sigfrido Ranucci has accepted the deputy editorship of RaiNews24 and, within his first hour in the chair, ordered every anchor to report to the studio floor for a personal stopwatch inspection, timed to the tenth of a second. The decision, communicated to the company, was described by Rai officials as «a normal internal move» and by Ranucci himself as «the beginning of a long-overdue audit of the clock».
By Tuesday morning the newsroom had been rearranged: a folding cot was installed beside the assignment desk, a wall of kitchen timers was mounted above the monitors, and each presenter was issued a laminated card listing the exact number of seconds permitted for a greeting, a handover and a sign-off. Ranucci personally timed the morning bulletin from a plastic chair in the corridor, stopwatch in each hand, and announced that the 7 a.m. edition had run «four seconds long, which is four seconds of the public's time nobody will give back».
Rai has since extended the regime to the weather desk, where forecasters now rehearse their gestures in a mirror before going live, and to the Rome bureau, which has been asked to submit to a weekly stopwatch drill on a Tuesday. A deputy editor's office was cleared of furniture to make room for a second cot, in case the audit runs past midnight. «We are not here to punish anyone», Ranucci told staff, consulting a timer. «We are here to find out, precisely, how long everything takes.»