I've never ceased to be in awe of our Global Voices team who have been working hard for the past year to amplify and curate the global online conversation. So were the judges for the 2006 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, who have chosen Global Voices Online as one of seven finalists for this prestigious award.
The winner will be announced on September 18th in Washington D.C. Click here to read the full press release.
Here is how I described Global Voices to the judges in our application:
Global Voices Online is your guide to the most interesting and globally relevant content in online citizens’ media outside North America and Western Europe. At a time when the international English-language media ignores topics that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, GVO aims to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media. Tens of millions of people around the world are sharing information, opinions, images, sounds and video online. We focus on the “bridge-bloggers:” those not merely talking to their friends about their pets and social lives, but who seek to engage a broader global audience in a conversation about what is important to them. But how can the wider global audience find these voices? If we are curious about the views of Saudi Arabian youth, how do we find out who has credibility and respect in the Saudi blogosphere? How does an American find out what the Russian language LiveJournal writers are saying about recent events in Belarus? GVO attempts to provide a solution to the worldwide Internet information overload. We are, in effect, an edited aggregator run by a core international team of 15 multilingual bloggers who select, explain, contextualize and translate conversations and citizens’ reporting that emerges from their regions. An additional group of 80-plus volunteer authors contribute even more in-depth perspective on the blog buzz in their countries. GVO’s new podcast editor has now taken the same curation model to audio with the newly-launched Global Voices Show, bringing you – literally – voices and perspectives from podcasters across the globe. In January 2006 we launched a new partnership with Reuters, introducing Reuters readers to the best of global online citizens media with tailored country-specific GVO feeds on pages devoted to specific countries and regions.
An excellent example of the way Global Voices and Reuters are working together to amplify citizens media can be found on this Reuters.com special Mideast Crisis page, where commentary from the region’s bloggers appears alongside news coverage and analysis from Reuters journalists. The GV and Reuters editorial teams continue to explore new ways to combine the best of citizens media and news agency journalism toward a common goal: a better informed public discourse about the important issues of our world.
Global Voices is a non-profit project housed at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. We are grateful to everybody there for putting up with me and Ethan as we worked to get this project off the ground. In addition to generous financial support from Reuters, Global Voices has received project-specific funding from the Dutch NGO Hivos. And we are eternally grateful to the Macarthur Foundation - who gave us the seed grant that made everything possible.
Most importantly, thanks to all the bloggers around the world who are working with passion and dedication to help us understand their countries and regions in completely new ways. Global Voices exists to serve you and to amplify your voices. We hope you’ll let us know what we’re doing right and what we could do better… and that you’ll help us improve. If you have any thoughts feel free to post them in the comments section of this post.
Head on over to Global Voices Online for more details about our application.
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