Global Voices

Global Voices is a transnational, multilingual community of writers, translators, and rights activists who work to build understanding across borders. It serves as a community-based newsroom, an advocacy network, a support for communities with significant political, economic, cultural, and linguistic challenges to online participation, and a center of reporting, research, and exploration of the many ways technology enables participation in societies. Its network of more than 1,000 contributors in more than 180 countries creates original reporting, analysis, and commentary. Since 2019, it has operated the Civic Media Observatory, a narrative analysis tool that identifies and tracks key themes and narrative frames that emerge around events, trends and other phenomena, and explains the context and subtext of local, vernacular, and multilingual media. This grant is recommended as general operating support, to help Global Voices continue its impactful work, especially analyzing the narrative frames in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the region. The intended outcome of this work is greater understanding of global events through the reporting on Global Voices’ network.

Global Voices is a nonprofit organization that provides a multilingual platform for grassroots journalism and advocacy, with a focus on online human rights, freedom of expression and digital rights. Global Voices’ network consists of more than 1,000 journalists, writers, human rights advocates, activists, and community members from more than 180 countries that contribute original reporting, analysis, and commentary. Global Voices also serves as an advocate for endangered and indigenous languages and a center of research into the ways technology enables and supports public participation. Its 15 regional editors work with its vast network of contributors and develops publication partnerships that amplify the reach of its reporting and commentary.  This award is recommended as general operating support and will result in more journalistic stories from around the world on underreported topics, produced in the public interest, and made broadly accessible.

Global Voices, founded in 2004, is a multifaceted nonprofit organization that provides a widely accessible platform for underreported global stories and disseminates them through numerous partner news outlets; supports free online expression by writers and activists from marginalized groups in more than 180 countries; and monitors and analyzes threats to free expression around the world. MacArthur support to Global Voices Editorial enables it to continue to support its network of more than 1,200 citizen journalists, writers, activists, and fifteen regional editors; develop publication partnerships that amplify the reach of this reporting and commentary; and work with experts and researchers to study the sources of threats to non-violent civic free expression online through its Advox program and make this information widely available.

Global Voices is a borderless, virtual newsroom comprising more than 1,400 mostly volunteer writers, analysts, online media experts, and translators. A small editorial staff curates stories from over 150 countries in 40 languages, publishing and disseminating the most important and compelling citizen reporting, with a particular focus on surfacing stories by and about marginalized groups. Global Voices is also an active community that organizes and advocates for an open and accessible internet, and safe and free online expression. Once every 12 to 24 months, the Global Voices (GV) community meets face-to-face at a Citizen Media Summit. This Summit serves as both a business meeting for GV contributors, as well as a larger public gathering of bloggers, academics, activists, technologists, development experts, and policymakers assembled to discuss major issues. This grant provides support for the 2017 Summit to be held in Sri Lanka.

Global Voices is an international online news service and citizen media organization. Over 800 contributors from 170 countries write news articles and opinion pieces for Global Voices. These articles are translated by a volunteer community and edited by professional regional editors. They are published on globalvoicesonline.org, which attracts about 800,000 regular readers, and over 50 syndication partners around the world, among them: the BBC, The Guardian, The Washington Post, PRI’s The World, Deutsche Welle, The Moscow Times, Al Jazeera and many regional news organizations in the Global South. When Global Voices was created in 2004, it was among the very first projects to aggregate and curate a truly global and online community of citizen reporters. Today, there are many "citizen" blogging and advocacy sites, focused on a particular region, country or issue and working in a single language or with a narrow point of view or agenda, but Global Voices remains a leading multilingual community, convener, and model for broad-based reporting and citizen engagement. Numerous Global Voices alumnae have used their experience with Global Voices to create new citizen media sites like Syria Untold (a digital project collecting stories about the Syrian struggle) and new civil society organizations like Nawaat in Tunisia or Bolo Bhi in Pakistan (both organizations that advocate for freedom of expression). MacArthur funding will support staff salaries for the global newsroom and administration.