Ellery Biddle, our Advocacy Director, getting some editing tips from our North East Asia Editor Oiwan's daughter. Photo taken by Sahar Habib Ghazi at the Newsroom Editors meeting in Cebu Philippines January 26, 2015.
A lot goes on behind the scenes in the “newsroom” — the place your stories go before they are published on Global Voices.
We want to make sure the community is up to date with everything going on, so every few months Lauren and I will share highlights about traffic, new partnerships, changes in staff, media mentions — basically anything cool happening in the newsroom. Here goes:
Thank you, Asteris; welcome, Nevin and Chris!
- Many thanks and much appreciation to Asteris for leading the newsletter with love, diligence and care the last two years. Asteris continues to be our prolific Twitter editor, while Nevin Thompson, our Japanese language editor, took over GV’s daily and weekly newsletter in March. Our newsletter continues to grow. We now have 7,580 daily subscribers and 13,400 weekly subscribers. If you aren't included in those numbers, sign up here! [1]
- Chris, our Central Asia editor, joined the sub-editing team as weekend sub-editor. Authors who have published posts on weekends are already well acquainted with him. Lauren Finch and Kevin Rothrock continue to help run subediting on weekdays. Building our subediting capacity on weekends was a big demand at the Summit, and we are so glad that we have been able to do this.
Top performing posts for April and May
- An analysis piece by Lawrence Alexander, Social Network Analysis Reveals Full Scale of Kremlin's Twitter Bot Campaign [2], received 32K views, with an average time of 6:22 minutes on page
- Ndesanjo’s post The 147 People Killed in the Garissa Attack Are More Than a Statistic was viewed more than 24K times, [3]with an average time of 4:40 minutes on page
- Kevin Rothrock’s The ‘Beauty’ of Russian Homophobia [4] was viewed about 17K times, [3]with an average time of 5:08 minutes on page
- The Kremlin Declares War on Memes, also by Kevin Rothrock, [5]was viewed 9K times, [3]with an average time of 5 minutes on page.
- Leaked Emails Reveal What Vladimir Putin Tells World Leaders at Private Meals [6]by Aric Toler was viewed 8K times for about 4:27 minutes.
- Dear CNN, Uganda Is Not Tanzania [7] by Prudence Nyamishana was viewed about 6K times, with an average time of 4 minutes on page.
- Liberland, the Balkans’ Newest Micronation, Is Looking for Citizens [8] by Danica Radisic was viewed 5K times, [3]with an average time of 7:43 minutes on page.
- Nevin Thompson’s Japanese Women Push Back Against Leaning In [9] was viewed about 5K times, [3]with an average time of 4:22 minutes on page.
Partnerships
- PRI.org, with whom we’ve partnered on swapping [10] content for two years, launched a new series called Across Women’s Lives [11]. They’ve republished five GV stories there so far by Faisal Kapadia [12], Nevin Thompson [13], Kevin Rothrock [14], Pantha [15] and Mahsa Alimardani [16] and are looking for more stories from our community about web and social media coverage of gender equity around the world. They are encouraging people to use the hashtag #womenslives when sharing stories about women and girls changing their world. They are also highlighting some of our translations, like in this story here: Thank the Ottoman Empire for the taco al pastor [17]
- Other new partnerships launched this year: Ensia [18] (Jan.); Iran Voices [19] (Feb.), ICHRI [20] (Feb.), DW-Portuguese (Mar.) Pak Voices [21] (Mar.), Radio Ambulante [22] (Apr.), Pamir Times (Apr.), Prachatai [23] (May) and Balochistan Point [24] (May).
- We finally created a partnership page [25] on the site. We hope to build on it and create something more in-depth and connected to partner content.
Transparent, collaborative editing
In a move to make our editing process more collaborative and transparent, we are digging deeper into Edit Flow, a plugin we launched on the English site last summer. It is now also in use across Lingua sites. Some of the new features include:
- Adding a user in Edit Flow User Notifications now grants them superpower access to edit a post, irrespective of whether they are the author of the post or an editor.
- Edit Flow also allows authors, translators and editors to communicate about a post with Editorial Comments inside the post editor and get email Notifications when the post's status changes. We've found it makes a big difference when working together on a post and makes it a lot easier to loop someone into a conversation. More details here [26].
Editors meetings
Every six weeks, the editors in the newsroom get together for a voice conference. Here are some notes from our last two meetings.
- Chris Rickleton, GV’s Central Asia editor, is now helping out on sub-editing during the weekends, so no more delays on publishing Friday-Saturday-Sunday.
- We’ve experimented post-summit in different writing formats, such as the Are You at Risk of Becoming a Terrorist? Quiz [27] and the exchange of emails [28] between GV Francophone editor Lova Rakotomalala and GV author Nwachukwu Egbunike. We also talked about the merits of shorter posts versus longer posts (more than 1,100 words).
- We’re always looking to improve how to welcome new authors. General consensus was nothing can replace a good old-fashioned one-on-one Skype call, even though a welcome video or something of the sort might be a good idea.
- Lots of GV volunteers have amazing social media savvy in addition to writing and translation skills. Regional GV teams could create volunteer social media teams.
- All GV content is published with a Creative Commons license [29], meaning other sites can republish or remix it as long as they give us proper attribution, provide a link, indicate if changes were made to the original. If you notice any sites taking content without adhering to that license, please let us know.
- GV Radio is live [30]! If you know of any interesting podcasts in your area that you think would be a good fit on GV Radio, please fill out this form [31].
Media take notice of Global Voices
In the past few weeks, media have been paying attention to the excellent work being done at Global Voices.
- Quartz republished Northeast Asia editor Oiwan Lam's post Five Young Feminists Still Missing in China [32]; RuNet Echo author Will Wright and RuNet Echo editor Kevin Rothrock's post Who the Hell Keeps Leaking Kremlin Correspondence? [33]; and Japan editor Nevin Thompson’s post In Japan, a Social Network Dedicated Entirely to Weather News [34].
- PRI interviewed Advox editor Ellery Roberts Biddle for its story Renewed diplomacy still leaves Cubans stuck in a dial-up world [35].
- NPR interviewed RuNet Echo editor Kevin Rothrock [36] about the Kremlin's “war on memes”.
- PBS Mediashift's Daily Must Reads [37] highlighted author Milton Ramirez's post Meet Mexico's Crowdfunding Campaign Against Censorship and Bots [38].
- RuNet Echo editor Tetyana Lokot appeared on Voice of America [39] and on Al Jazeera's Listening Post [40].
- Vice used Danica Radisic's post Liberland, the Balkans’ Newest Micronation, Is Looking for Citizens as a source in its coverage of the same story [41].
- The International Journalists’ Network named GV author Elaine Díaz one of 4 Cuban Bloggers to Know [42].
- NPR interviewed [36] Kevin Rothrock about the Kremlin's “war on memes”.
- And Iran editor Mahsa Alimardani's report New Research: Iran is Using ‘Intelligent’ Censorship on Instagram [43], which she co-authored with Frederic Jacobs, was highlighted by the Associated Press [44] and Vice [45].
Did you get noticed by the media too? Please send Lauren or Sahar an email and they’ll add you to our media mentions page!
That’s it for now. We’ll be back in July!