The panel discussion, divided into four sessions, promotes a broad debate on the evolution of the festival idea. The meetings consider emerging cultural, social and economic aspects from these specific "format" to discuss whether and how festivals have maintained their nature as places of innovation, experimentation, risk-taking propensity from the point of view of artistic research; how much the development and fortune of different festivals are inextricably linked to the cities and territories that host them, so much so that in recent years the festival formula has been identified as an effective device to contribute to the place branding of territories; how festivals have contributed to broadening the audience, whether they have worked in terms of growth and outreach to more culturally experimental proposals, and what are today the most interesting models and approaches to audience development and audience engagement; what is the role of cultural journalism today and whether print and new media have different and perhaps complementary roles in talking about culture and to which audiences; what are the boundaries between cultural journalist and subject-matter expert-critic and how much these two figures overlap or are assimilated. This is discussed with Italian and foreign festival directors, sociologists, economists, and journalists.