Africa: Interrogating the blogosphere
Written byNdesanjo Macha
Koluki interrogates the blogosphere by looking at the Globl Voices Online coverage of “Portuguese-speaking African countries”: “The most striking observation from this graph is that OC appears not only, as we have seen before, as the “undisputed champion” of GVO reporting about the “Angolan blogosphere”, but also as the “champion” (only “disputed” by Carlos Serra, one of the bloggers I covered for GVO) of their “Lusophone” Sub-Saharan Africa reporting. A second interesting observation is that less than one third of the bloggers covered are actually based in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
Written byNdesanjo Macha
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Koluki has some interesting comments but I think she missed a fundamental point here: The coverage by the Portuguese editorial team is not geographically targeted – we aim to report on blogs written in Portuguese, regardless of where the bloggers sit. For that kind of region coverage, we have our region editors, such as Ndesanjo Macha who covers Sub-Saharan Africa.
Therefore, it is not fair to say that the Portuguese coverage is representative of how Global Voices covers the “Angolan blogosphere”, or indeed any other country based blogospheres (with the exception from Brazil, which has its coverage solely handled by the Portuguese team). In addition to this, only since December the coverage of Portuguese speaking countries have been extended, and it takes an inevitable while to build a good feed, get to know the bloggers, etc, not to mention time reading through as much posts as possible.
We link to sources that we believe are reliable and hard working bloggers, such as Orlando Castro (who nevertheless had 10 links only out of more than 250 articles I’ve written) and Carlos Serra (who is always ahead of the mainstream media), but we are always keen to meet new bloggers. I’d like also to remember that everyone is welcome to send links to the blogs *in Portuguese* they think we should be watching, so please help us to get better!
Similarly, if you would like to contribute helping us to shed light on your Portuguese speaking blogosphere, do get in touch. We would love to have more authors contributing to our coverage – there are so many wonderful blogs out there that we need more than only 2 committed people to be fair in this challenging role.
Here is how you can help:
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/for-bloggers/