Voci Globali: Global Voices and La Stampa · Global Voices
Bernardo Parrella

Global Voices is nearly three weeks in to a new partnership with Italian daily newspaper La Stampa that is designed to feature the best of the international blogs on the newspaper's website. We call it “Voci Globali“ and the activity is centered around a blog on La Stampa that republishes Global Voices stories together with translations of the best posts from 25 recommended world blogs. The headlines are regularly featured in the foreign news section of the homepage of newspaper, and individual stories have also made it into print.
Among the blogs we watch most closely are the Afghan Women's Writing Project, Congogirl, Repeating Islands, Registan, Talk Morocco, as well as the blogs of Global Voices insiders Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca McKinnon, David Sasaki, and Sami ben Gharbia. Most of the blogs are in English, but some are also in Spanish and French.
The project is run by an (enthusiastic!) team of translators that works separately but in parallel to the Lingua translators of Global Voices in Italian. It is hard work to manage both projects, testing collaborative translation methods, and getting to know La Stampa's online platform all at once. But so far we are publishing at least a post per day, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
La Stampa's homepage
On Saturday February 20, a Global Voices post by Juliana Rincón Parra, Mobile Libraries of the World, was printed in the newspaper. And on Sunday March 7 , the day of the elections in Iraq, La Stampa printed an Italian translation of a post by Iraqi teenage blogger “Sunshine” in Mosul, about voting for the first time in her life. After the earthquake in Chile, La Stampa asked for a fresh story, and we were  quickly able to translate the first report on Chilean web reactions Global Voices by Eduardo Ávila.
We've translated stories on a wide range of topics, and have so far received very positive feedback in online commentary. Here is a list of blogs and websites mentioning the new collaboration.
A wonderful side effect of Voci Globali has been greater exposure for Global Voices in Italian. This has encouraged several new people to volunteer to join our translation team. Subscriptions to our weekly newsletter have risen to 230 members, our Facebook group to 683 members, and our Twitter feed to 110 followers.  And this is just the beginning. We hope that our projects will soon be discovered by many more Italian speakers around the globe, deepening and widening the reach of Global Voices as a whole.
Mainstream media are hungry for fresh content and different angles, and readers are eager to encounter new perspectives from ‘the global conversation’ online. Although the experiment with La Stampa  has a limited (compared to Global Voices) focus on pre-selected blogs, this merging of professional and citizen media seems a challenging but promising idea. More so, it shows potential for a further branching out of Global Voices and its Lingua translation sites as valuable resources for media outlets, and their readers around the world.