For Media

Global Voices Online, winner of the 2006 Knight-Batten Grand Prize for Innovations in Journalism, is a non-profit project founded at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Read more about the project here, or visit our media archive to find stories that have been written about us and the bloggers in our community.

Our international team of bloggers are your guides to the most original and interesting voices coming from blogs and podcasts around the globe. Each day on our web site you'll find a wealth of articles by our authors and editors, summarizing (and in some cases, translating) what bloggers from their countries and regions are talking about. Because North American and Western European voices and perspectives dominate both the international news media and the global Internet, Global Voices tends not to focus very much on these countries. You'll find the blogs we do cover full of local detail you can't often get elsewhere. Many communicate ideas and information that the mainstream press in their countries don't (or won't) cover for various reasons. We aim to bring previously un-heard voices into the mainstream media — and one of the ways we do that is by working with you.

Additionally, our site is equipped with a powerful search feature that allows you to search an index comprising all the blogs we’ve ever linked to, in addition to the site itself.

If you are an editor or reporter, we invite you to:

1. Visit our Special Coverage pages for blog updates on hot button issues in the world press. Use our feeds to improve coverage on your website.

2. Follow our daily Links, and Weblog articles from around the world. Our Advocacy site deals with freedom of speech issues as they affect bloggers.

3. Listen to our branded compilation podcast, which features clips from podcasts throughout the world, as well as our audio interviews with bloggers.

4. Subscribe to our daily e-mail updates, our daily digest summarizing the day's Weblog posts, or targeted RSS and JSS feeds for every country, region and topic label.

5. Run our headline feeds and reproduce our content on your own news site, as long as you adhere to the terms of our Creative Commons License by clearly attributing Global Voices as the source and linking back to us (read our attribution policy here). Wherever possible, we also hope you will include our logo, which is available here, along with the HTML code required to embed it on your site.

Some concrete examples of how Global Voices can help you:

NEWS EDITORS: People working on the international news desk for a TV station or newspaper can use Global Voices to find ideas for stories not necessarily covered by the likes of Reuters and AP. Even in the case of stories which are covered on the wires, Bloggers can often provide useful background, analysis, eyewitness perspectives and and alternative angles not found in the agency coverage.

Here's an example: In November 2006, our Arabic translator, Amira Al-Hussaini highlighted the “two-day orgy of sexual harrassment” that took place in the streets of Cairo during the Eid-Ul-Fitr festivities. The story was not reported in the mainstream media until bloggers started writing about it, embarrassing the Egyptian government into taking a stand on the issue. The analysis provided by Amira's two posts (her follow-up article is here) may have proven quite useful to editors and journalists in shaping stories on Egypt — or it might have suggest angles useful to your coverage.

Not clear about something one of our authors has written? Need more information? By all means, contact her! You may want to interview her or one of the bloggers she's linked to for a story. Most bloggers display an email address either on the front page of their blogs or in the “about” section. You may even want to hire our authors to do some story research for you — or even commission articles from them. We encourage news media to contact bloggers linked by Global Voices.

RADIO/MULTIMEDIA: We produce regular compilation podcasts and occasional interviews with bloggers. All Global Voices content is offered under a Creative Commons license, which means that broadcasters, podcasters, and all other content-creators are welcome to use all or parts of these podcasts as long as attribution is given to Global Voices.

BEAT REPORTERS: Is Iran part of your regional beat? Are you one of those poor souls tasked with covering an entire continent for your news organization? Bloggers writing from or about countries in your beat can quickly become your allies.

Every day, we hand-select blog stories that seem to us to be particularly interesting and important; you'll find them in the Links section of the Global Voices home page. The bloggers we focus on are very often people who write about their country or region for an international audience. They wouldn't be blogging if they didn't want the world to hear their views, so they make great potential story sources. Some might even be open to working for you as writers, researchers or fixers. As with any source, it's the reporter's responsibility to vet that source for credibility before quoting them or using their information…

CREDIBILITY ISSUES: Returning to our Egypt example, how do you know the blogger you wish to use as a news sources really is who he claims to be? Need more information about his loyalties before you take his word on what's happening in Egypt? Naturally, you need to satisfy yourself on all these fronts as you would do with any story source. You can email him directly, and do the usual checking on information and analysis you'd get from any one source.

Global Voices currently does not have the staff to “vet” all the individual blogs we're linking to, so when we link to something we're saying “here's an interesting conversation” or “here's an interesting idea.” We're not saying, “we endorse what this blogger is saying as the gospel truth.” Quote from any blog at your own risk, just as you quote from any source at your own risk. And as with any source, anonymous blogs must pass a much higher credibility threshold than blogs whose authors make their identity public and their allegiances clear.

CONTACT US: If you have further questions or need help reaching bloggers for a story, please contact the Managing Editor, Solana Larsen (solana AT globalvoicesonline DOT org) or Managing Director Georgia Popplewell (editor AT globalvoicesonline DOT org) and we will get back to you as quickly as possible.

You can also contact our Regional Editors directly.

We welcome suggestions as to how Global Voices can help professional journalists bring more interesting, original, and diverse world new stories to their audiences.