Global Voices Online - Blog Voices from Around the World

Global Voices Online was one of the winners of the 2006 Kights-Batten Award for innovations in journalism. The website received this award for developing “an extraordinary site that allows for both editorial gatekeeping and wide access to news and information from underreported parts of the world.“

Global Voices Online is a non-profit citizen news and media outlet for bloggers around the world. Its goals are (from its website:

1. To call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.
2. To facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.
3. To advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

This is a great site for classes that deal with contemporary global and regional issues. It allows students and teachers to read perspectives on current events directly from bloggers ( all of which are translated into English, for us Anglophones) living in the countries that are experiencing these events.

In my World Regional Geography class, I often send students to local online newspapers in different countries to write reports. Lately, the website I have used for this has been World-Newspapers.com, which I will continue to use. However, I will now add Global Voices Online as an option as well. It will be interesting to see how (and which) student use this blog site, and how the results compare with more traditional online news outlets.