Interview with Global Voices - Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman

Global Voices(GV), a nonprofit global citizens media project, was launched almost one year ago by Berkman fellows Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman. The goal of GV is to "redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens' media." How do they do it? "We're using a wide variety of technologies - weblogs, wikis, podcasts, tags, aggregators and online chats - to call attention to conversations and points of view that we hope will help shed new light on the nature of our inter-connected world."

Just one year since its start GV receives 11,000 visitors a day and a quarter of a million each month, and recently won Deutsche Welle's award for "Best Journalistic Blog in English."

GV growth isn't limited to its site traffic. Over the summer Rebecca and Ethan began working with six regional editors, all of whom monitor the conversations going on in their region of the world. Haitham Sabbah covers the Middle East/North Africa; Neha Viswanathan covers South Asia; Sokari Ekine covers Sub-Saharan Africa; Jose Manuel Tesoro covers East Asia; David Sasaki covers the Americas; and Nathan Hamm covers Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus and Central Asia.

We recently caught up with Rebecca and Ethan -- they travel a lot -- and asked them a few questions about GV and its future.  If you're not familiar with GV, a good place to start before reading the interview would be the GV "about" page and the GV FAQ.

Or, you can skip both and jump into the conversation.

Question: What is Global Voices?

Rebecca MacKinnon: How I like to describe it -- assuming that someone knows what blogs are -- is that Global Voices is your guide to the most interesting conversations happening on blogs outside of the United States. There are people talking online around the world who feel that they aren't being represented properly or that they have something to say that isn't being heard. They are setting up weblogs online, many of them in English. For other people, it is very difficult to find these conversations. We have set up a team of bloggers from around the world who are monitoring conversations in their regions. Every day they are linking to what they find to be the most interesting things in their region.
I call this "citizens media," because it is different from what some call "citizens' journalism." Some people challenge whether blogs can be considered a form of alternative journalism, and it's true, many bloggers are not trying to be journalists. They are having a conversation about what is important to them, and what is happening around them. Some bloggers seek to be journalists and to produce work that could be held to journalistic standards, but many don’t. But even those who don’t are conducting an important conversation that wants and needs to be heard if people in different countries are to understand each other better. 

Ethan Zuckerman: Add to it the notion that it is very hard to get a picture of what is going on around the world from mainstream media. There are systematic biases that have been documented as to what mainstream newspapers and television stations generally cover.  Global Voices is a way to take on those biases by exposing people to voices they would not otherwise hear.

Rebecca MacKinnon: To give alternative perspectives.  One of the questions people often ask -- Joi Ito and I were on CNN this weekend - is how do you know whether these people are credible? How can you trust what people are saying? How can anyone claim that this is journalism? Because they/it are not part of a credible organization.
My response is that these are individual voices appearing online. It is very different from a professional news service, it is a conversation. As regards the whole credibility issue, we address this by saying that it is not an automatic aggregation, a random computer search tool. This is a community of human beings who are following what is happening in their region, who are following what is going to happn, are linking to these blogs with a certain amount of knowledge about what is going on. It isn't blind linking, blind aggregation.


Question: For people who aren't that familiar with citizens media, can you contextualize Global Voices role in the greater media world?

Rebecca MacKinnon: What we are seeing now is that the whole media ecosystem is changing.  Before the Internet you had TV correspondents, radio correspondents, magazine correspondents, all telling the masses out there what they needed to know.  People had no way to talk back, to publicize their reactions, no way of getting out their views if they felt misrepresented.  Now with the Internet anybody can go online and talk about what concerns them.  Most of these people are not trained, don't have the time to do investigative research, but the information and perspectives they have also matter.  Journalists need to take them seriously.  We're seeing a give-and-take where you have professional media on the one hand, and you have some citizens who are doing real citizens' journalism who want to be held to the same standards as journalists.  Then you have many other people who just want to be taken seriously.  And they should be. We must listen to them. And that's what Global Voices is doing.

Ethan Zuckerman: A lot of the parts of the world we're very interested in are also places where the Media has a real tendency to report on the big events.  "The leader has done this." There is much less reporting on the events on the ground, the stories affecting peoples' lives.  You generally get journalism that is leader focused, process focused, but doesn't look with much detail.  One of the things that Global Voices does is let people have a very different window into what is going on in the country, in those cultures.  It is hard to get out of the newspaper an answer about why people were marching out on the streets.  You can get that on blogs.  We see ourselves as a complement to news services that aren't able to give you the more personal, the more individual stories on the street and actually find the people who are able to do that.
Part of the challenge is that blogging is still an elite phenomenon.  Not elite in that the top percentage of the wealthy are blogging, but that you need to be able to afford the time in a cyber cafe.  It is still a tool for people who work in technology, who have access to computers.  We have a long way to go.



Question: When I visited your site I read blog roundups and also listened to podcasts. What is the balance between content creation and content aggregation?  Will Global Voices focus more on content creation in the future?

Rebecca MacKinnon: What we are primarily doing is linking to the content from people's blogs: summarizing, distilling. From time to time some of our volunteers post Q&A interviews with other bloggers, but our focus is not on getting people to create original content for our site. Instead, we are linking to a web of original content all over the internet, enabling you to find it easily, and helping to put it in context.

Ethan Zuckerman: All of this only hints at what we're able to do in the future. The two of us are part time. The editors are part time. And there are a whole lot of volunteers. The vast majority of stuff are things that are already created. Things being created are in the minority.

Rebecca MacKinnon: People like to create original content in their own spaces, in their own podcasts, in their own feeds. It is very difficult to get people to contribute original content without paying them. Citizens media sites that are doing that are unrealistic, and probably not very sustainable over the long run.

Ethan Zuckerman: In terms of original content, we also create guides – guides to the blogosphere, guides to anonymous blogging. As an organization we’ll be doing content development in the future. Our model is the aggregator. We weren’t sure it was going to be the model going forward, but the model of an edited aggregator is one that's proven to work very well.



Question: How did Global Voices start?

Rebecca MacKinnon: It started with an international bloggers meeting held at Harvard nearly a year ago on Dec. 11 when Ethan and I brought together, with the help of the Berkman Center and the Open Society Institute and other small funders, a group of bloggers from various parts of the world to participate in a day long meeting in which we wanted to look at how to globalize the conversation online – how to make citizens media a more global endeavor, how to keep it from being dominated by people in the US and western Europe where bandwidth is best.
A blog slowly grew out of it. Initially it was a blog set up for the conference. Afterwards people started posting things to it. In May we became more systematic by posting daily roundups. We began to recruit over the summer, when we recruited regional editors. By September we had six regional editors - African Middle East/N.Africa, South Asia, the Americas, East Asia, E.Euro/Russia/CentAsia/Caucasus, and Sub-saharan Africa.  Based on our current funding we can pay only a very token amount of money each month to six people.
We are deliberately not focusing on the United States.  We have not put resources toward someone working on Western Europe because we felt that other regions are a priority and European bloggers get more attention naturally.



Question: What are Global Voices milestones?

Rebecca MacKinnon: We redesigned the site in July so that it had a three column roundup.  In the middle column we have regional editors contributing five to ten links daily to blog posts in their region.  In the left hand side of the blog we have volunteer contributors who post once a week, once a month sometimes. The Indonesian blogger will come on and talk about the hottest topics in their blogosphere.  Sometimes when there is breaking news, like the Jordanian bombings, the editor came on very quickly to talk about what Jordanian blogs are talking about.  People are becoming very enthusiastic about getting peoples' perspectives into the conversation quickly, not only for the hopes that people will hear their views because they're concentrated at Global Voices but because we have a lot of media organizations following.  Their views are more likely to get media attention.

Ethan Zuckerman: The real currency of the blogosphere is attention.  A lot of bloggers are participating because they're trying to get attention for their own writing and their own country as a whole.
Our editors do an outstanding amount of work.  It is important to understand that we are not trying to recreate an international news wire.  This is much closer to an international effort. People want to see their contributions recognized.  We are trying to put a strong editorial tone on that.  It is not that we can support the veracity of what people say.  We try and feature the most insightful. 



Question: How does Global Voices self-organize?

Ethan Zuckerman: With a biweekly IRC chat.  We ask all our editors to participate in a two hour long chat on Monday afternoon. That is where we make a lot of our decisions about what we're covering and how we're covering it.  We spend a lot of time working with editors to make sure their contributors understand what the expectations are.

Rebecca MacKinnon:  Global Voices is not micromanaged. We leave most things to the regional editors, but there is a lot of coordination in terms of the direction in which we want to go, how many contributors we're inviting, how to achieve a better balance of regional content.  Our editors' meetings are more focused on how we're organizing everything, how we're managing the content, how we're organizing information on the site, how we're standardizing categories, a whole bunch of logistical stuff. Since this is a new model - this is not something that has a tried-and-true way of doing things - we're experimenting as we go. 



Question: What is an example of something you've tried that hasn't worked?

Ethan Zuckerman: Podcasting is an example of something that hasn't worked well. It takes a lot of effort to create a podcast. They don't nearly have as large an audience as text features.  We'll probably try again in a few months.

Question: An example of what has worked?

Rebecca MacKinnon: The regional editors model. The fact that these people have been so willing to work so hard for so little compensation with the daily roundups, especially certain regions of the world.

Ethan Zuckerman: In some communities the blog index wiki has been remarkably successful.



Question: What are your roles?

Ethan Zuckerman: Rebecca does a bit more of the editorial side of things, managing the minutia of who is posting, making sure the regional editors are coordinating with their volunteers, logistical coordination, editorial strategy. 

Rebecca MacKinnon: Ethan is doing more of the activism side, more of the technology development.  We have equal weight in terms of where we're going conceptually, what the point is.  We're also letting the regional editors drive this as much as possible.  We've seen with some of the regional editors they've picked up on projects and have really pushed them.  Our regional editor Haitham from the Middle East is doing a lot of work with reblog tools. We'll probably move further in the direction of working with that because he is so enthusiastic.  We have other editors who want to do a lot in terms of outreach and training.  So, we're encouraging them to take the lead on that.

Ethan Zuckerman: One other thing we're doing a lot of is outreach -- speaking at conferences, talking to reporters.  That is another thing we try hard to split between the two of us.  One of us has to do more with one aspect of the project, whether it's technical or journalistic.  The other aspect is that we both have geographic strengths.  I know a bit more about Africa and the Middle East.  Rebecca knows infinitely more about Asia than I.  Increasingly we're asking our regional editors to handle those questions, as they know their regions better than Rebecca and I do.



Question: You've talked a lot about Global Voices's regional editors.  Who are they? What did you look for when selecting them?

Ethan Zuckerman: We found them by trying to get to know what was going on in the local blogosphere, looking for people who were already emerging as leaders in their local community.  That is a clear example of how we found Haitham who was already blogging a lot in the Arabic world, who seemed to have a lot of respect from people in the community.  He was someone who was running half a dozen blog sites, aggregating info from the Arabic world.  We felt strongly about getting him on board.  We're looking for someone who is already a good blogger, already has a readership, already has an understanding of the communities they're dealing with.



Question: How are you going to develop Global Voices over the next year?

Ethan Zuckerman: There are two issues. Translation -- As more and more people come online from more and more countries, the blogosphere is less of an English phenomenon.  We either need to recognize that there are different language communities, and that there might be a need for different language aggregators.  You can imagine a spanish voices global voices analogue.  You can imagine a lot of translation of spanish translation posts.
The second big problem is that there are parts of the world that have not generated a large blogger community.  The question is - To what extent do you intervene? Do you try and find groups of people and try and get them blogging? Do you wait and see?
We want to let our community of editors and contributors play a larger role in how GV develops over the coming year.



Question: What are those communities?

Ethan Zuckerman: They are all over the place.  Central Asia doesn't have nearly the blogging community as others.  Also certain countries – Myanmar is an interest of ours, as well as regions like  Francophone Africa.