Global Voices – Friends You Never Knew You Had

Profile for Independent Media
17 February 2009

When Ghana’s opposition party won a historic democratic election in 2000, the New York Times’ sparse day-late coverage was buried deep behind the front page. Ethan Zuckerman, who was helping with the elections, was disappointed to see such reporting. He wondered if there might be a way in the future to share information with the world, bypassing the mainstream media.

With this in mind, he cofounded Global Voices Online in 2005 with ex-reporter Rebecca MacKinnon. Initially a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, it has since grown into a site where people from all over the world can interact - sharing stories, photos and videos from their native lands.

Zuckerman came into the project knowing the importance of connecting underrepresented populations to the Internet. Before coming to Harvard, Zuckerman helped found Geekcorps, a nonprofit organization that brings the Internet and other other technologies to developing nations in Africa. It was this background in outreach that would propel Global Voices into poor communities.

MacKinnon brought with her the knowledge of censorship and Internet regulation in Asian countries. She worked for CNN in Asia before coming to Harvard as a research fellow for the Berkman Center. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, she now teaches online journalism and conduct research on Internet freedom at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center. Together she and Zuckerman would combine their strengths to create something new: a community where people from across the globe can share their experiences.

Navigating the Globe

Global Voices is a worldwide human-powered news aggregator, offering hand-selected articles and blogs from around the world. The website functions as a global marketplace where people who are often ignored by the mainstream western media can comment on media coverage through blogging as well as share their own stories.

Global Voices aims not to have a point of view, but rather to give voice to all people who have an interesting and relevant take on both domestic and global matters. The site is not necessarily activist journalism, though some articles do advocate action. It is journalism from an activist organization. The site does not attempt to be balanced, but it does try to maintain transparency. In this respect, it is a step up from corporate media that is not transparent but might have a point of view while claiming to offer balanced news.

Global Voices is maintained by more than 150 volunteer author-bloggers and translators and 20 freelance part-time regional editors. Editors are paid $800 a month and work 20 to 30 hours per week. Run on WordPress software, Global Voices features blog entries searchable by region, country, topic, and media type (i.e. video, podcast, photo). There is also a “Special Coverage” section for global topics such as the violence in Gaza, the 2008 Olympics and World AIDS Day.

In terms of search, Global Voices resembles the portal system employed by About.com or the early Yahoo! rather than the search-based system of Google. Articles are not ranked by users, but rather controlled by regional editors who can feature articles on the front page or in regional or national sections.

Though many stories concern politics, freedom of speech and human rights, stories have such diverse headlines as “Armenia: New and old traditions mix on St. Valentine’s Day,” “Hong Kong: Network Mobilization Against Religions Hegemony,” and “Sudan: Video Declarations on Darfur Genocide by the Perpetrators.”

Veronica Khoklova is the regional editor for Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to posting articles from bloggers in her region, Khoklova also blogs and translates articles herself. A recent story she wrote covers the death of Marian Cozma, a Romanian handball player killed in a fight at a nightclub. She features portions of entries from other bloggers, including a tribute video made after his death. Blogging style follows the classic template popular on such blogs as the Huffington Post. An article is introduced before being supplemented by news clippings and quotes from other bloggers, with varying amounts of the blogger’s own analysis and commentary in between.

There are others who do original reporting. One recent article featured a citizen journalist interviewing Jen Hughes, an Australian documentary maker and founder of Suai Media Space, a multimedia site that seeks to connect people from East Timor to the global conversation.

The free spirit of Global Voices does not guarantee the accuracy or integrity of individual entries. Though editors check their sources and blogs that they feature, Global Voices does not have a staff to check all the individual entries for correct content. Those who write articles are asked to be honest and check their sources, but there is no standardized verification process.

While one of the core values of Global Voices is to end censorship, the site is by no means an open market. Authors and bloggers are hand-picked by editors. Because all information is at least overseen by editors, there is a possibility that some articles will be excluded due to personal reasons or misunderstanding. In addition, all comments are moderated. Messages classified as hateful or obscene are not displayed.

Global Voices, then, does not give a voice to every voiceless person. But it does attempt to give voice to people who have something interesting and constructive to add to the global conversation while preventing false and hateful items from appearing on the site.

Creating a Conversation

The Global Voices concept was first demonstrated 2004 at a blogging conference sponsored by the Berkman Center. Titled “Global Voices Online: Blogging for Independent Journalists, Concerned Citizens and Activists,” the event created enough interest to launch the Global Voices Online website the next year.

One of the heroes of the conference was Salam Pax, the pseudonymous citizen blogger from Iraq who covered the bombing of Baghdad. His site was so popular at the time that Google set up mirror sites to accommodate all the readers. MacKinnon wrote in her account of the conference, “Thanks to an easy-to-use, free weblog service hosted on a server in the peaceful Western world, he could share his life with us in a way that hadn’t been possible before.”

Though the conference venerated Salam Pax, its emphasis was on creating a global conversation. To this end, the event featured two Iraqi bloggers identified as Omar and Mohammed, bloggers of the pro-U.S. blog, Iraq the Model. Having lived under Saddam Hussein’s regime, they believed in sharing their experiences and goals for democracy in Iraq.

It is this idea of sharing one’s life that has driven Global Voices to find a way to open up global dialogue. This task has become easier every year as new technologies have emerged. Western websites, such as YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, Livejournal and Twitter have allowed citizens of the world to interact in ways unimaginable before the creation of the Internet. These sites that allow the sharing of information thrive on the hardware of the Internet age: broadband Internet, iPods that allow podcasting, digital cameras and camcorders, Internet-enabled cameraphones and smartphones.

Shortly after the conference the 2004 Asian Tsunami ravaged countries along the Indian Ocean, making clear the global implications of these devices. Media coverage of the tsunami was not limited to broadcast and newspapers. Blogs and YouTube allowed people to access first-hand the destruction the tsunami caused, free of a mainstream media gatekeeper. For one of the first times, the world was able to see a terrible disaster not through the distorting lens of corporate media, but the eyes of those who experienced it.

But more technology was needed to make Global Voices a reality. At the time of the conference, there was no Arabic-language blogging software, so Arabic-speaking bloggers had to be able to speak another language in order to be heard. A company called Spirit of America introduced a tool at the conference that allowed Arabic-speaking bloggers to blog in their native tongue. But in this case, only blogs that were “friendly with democracy” would be allowed. Over the years, companies have developed tools with no strings attached, including Google’s version on blogger, released in early 2008.

Even now, translation is one of the key difficulties of maintaining Global Voices. The site models itself on Wikipedia, relying on a number of volunteer translators to churn out translations in 15 languages as diverse as Serbian, Hindi and Malagasy.

Everyone Together Now

Global Voices is funded by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Reuters, Hivos (a Dutch nonprofit), the John S. and James L. Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as donations from users. The only for-profit company funding the organization is U.K.-based Reuters, which claims to add no bias to the website, while still deriving the benefits of getting immediate access to the coverage.

Stories from Global Voices have shown up in mainstream new sources over the years, with articles recently picked up by blogs at the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times.

The project has also spawned new sites that seek to expand the global conversation.

Global Voices Advocacy seeks to “raise awareness of online freedom of speech issues, and to share tools and tactics with activists and bloggers facing censorship on different parts of the globe.” The site features a news section, software for anonymous blogging and special features such as an “Access Denied Map” that shows regions of the world in which certain web sites are banned by the government.

Rising Voices aims to bring greater diversity to the Global Voices network by providing resources and funding to un- or underrepresented communities.

In 2008 Global Voices teamed up with Reuters to create Voices Without Votes, a site designed to let the world weigh in on the U.S. presidential election. The site featured a collection of blogs as well as section of hand-picked entries from blogs across the world.

In his opening remarks at the conference that paved the way for Global Voices, Zuckerman declared, “Something really big is starting to happen… What I’m really curious about is whether to some extent we find ourselves becoming a movement.” While the site is not as popular as, say, the Huffington Post or New York Times, it does not aim to be either of those things. From its humble beginnings it remains humble, bringing together the voices of both experts and the average man in order to better inform the world what the world is up to.