Title
“GLocal” Reporting Web Platform - Bridging North/South communities through participatory cross-border investigative stories targeted on local media/audience

Your innovation
Developing an open-source multilingual platform (integrating digital team-working and communication tools) on our existing Freereporter.info website, to produce, market and distribute investigations on development-related issues (human rights, life resources and corporate/public accountability) affecting two or more communities located in distant geographical areas: Western World Communities (WWC) and Developing World Communities (DWC). Nowadays, globalization increases underestimated cause/effect links between DWC and WWC. Newswires simply skip them. Global investigations by mainstream media are too general to draw attention from Western audience. The latter is only captivated by stories somehow connected to its social context. So, our keyword is “GLocalization”: producing stories with a Local angle in order to bring global issues down to community audience, raise awareness in WWC, link them into a “remote neighbourhood” with DWC and stimulate mutual understanding and cooperation. Our project involves independent journalism organizations (IJO), local NGOs, freelance reporters from WWC and DWC (FR) and citizens (CZ). Once the web platform is in place, it will work in the following chronological order: 1) FR, IJO, NGOs or CZ input a number of issues affecting specific DWC; 2) FR from WWC choose those issues relating also to their respective communities; 3) FreeReporter posts stories pitches, also via Facebook (FB) and mobile phone (MP) alerts, linking to our website; 4) FR co-produce multimedia contents angled on local audience, available in local language, and distributed via local print/web/phone channels; 5) Freereporter collects (translates) and forwards via web, FB and MP, individual follow-ups on each story. The whole web/FB/MP-cycle will develop a non-stop, fast-accessible and multi-language story-telling, constantly monitoring and sharing between all communities members why/how the story has started and what has being done or changed since it was published.

Sustainability
The web platform costs 35,000 $, partly covered by private funds. Management costs, 50,000 $ per year, to be covered by other sponsors, such as the EU and OSI (grants applied for). Our business model is based on a flexible combination of media and crowd sourcing. Media sourcing will result from multi-country sales. Each story will be pitched via web and email to all media editors included in Freerporters’ database. Crowd-sourcing will rely on FB: Freereporter is creating large geographic/thematic groups of users from WWC, looking for customized contents which meet their specific needs and/or promote their ethic battles to a wider media audience. Investigations on specific topics will be announced in the relevant groups and call for donations linking to Freereporter website. Full stories and follow-ups will be advertised via emails, RSS feeds and sms, re-directing FB users to print/web outlets which published them. Result: on one hand thousands of FB users will be eager to donate online few dollars for stories they want to see published; on the other hand media will benefit form a growing number of viewers, thus being encouraged to buy our stories. This FB-driven “stories advertising system” will: 1) support local and international coverage of crucial issues in DWC thanks to financial contributions from WWC; 2) build a trustful cost/quality relation with both viewers and media, thus ensuring sustainability and keeping good journalism safe from commercial/political pressures.

Impact
In the short-term the project will be tested on a small scale. Pre-selected WWC from Europe and the US will twin with DWC case-by-case. FR from WWC and DWC will learn how to cooperate at distance and get higher shared profits by marketing stories to different viewers/media targets. The latter will learn how the proposed mechanism of costs sharing (between multiple FB users on a production level and multiple countries print/web outlets on a distribution level) may offer them better and affordable contents. In the mid-term, Freereporter will interface FB users (IJO, NGOs, CZ) from all WWC and WDC sharing common issues: together they will feed bottom-up inputs to start or better target new stories. In the long term, FreeReporter will become a powerful news tool helping an increasing number of local communities to see their daily life from a wider perspective: both WWC and DWC will acknowledge their interlinked problems, push them through the media, join forces for common solutions and enhance their democratic participation in that globalisation process which has, so far, kept them away from each other. More particularly: WWC will be able to deal in a global way with issues which governments and corporations commonly “sell” as mere “foreign” or “local” affairs; DWC will finally have a word on what should be dealt with to improve quality of life in a globalized world: their freedom of speech will be enhanced by international exposure and higher economic benefits for local FR.

Team
Behind Freereporter there is an international team of experienced FR from WWC (such as me – http://stefanovalentino.blogspot.com), specialized in field reporting in developing countries and working in different physical locations. All of them are committed to help journalism to face its greatest challenges: tracking the interconnection between local and global issues; widening citizens participation in the news making; bridging the gap between independent reporting and mainstream media. They will share their respective media contacts in a common database. Each of them will represent and promote the platform brand among the editors in his/her own country. A couple of in-house back office editors will collect and market reporters' pitches, raise funds and manage incomes. Both reporters and editors are recruited by my no-profit organization RICSI (Reporters for an Interactive, Cooperative and Specialized Information) is currently extending its worldwide network of IJO and FR from WDC and is already involved in several partnerships, such as the one with FAIR (Forum for African Investigative Reporters), representing different pieces of the overall project which has now come to its mature stage. My strategic position in an multinational capital as Brussels, together with my frequent assignments abroad, allows me to keep in touch with key partners from all over the planet, thus placing me in the best position to coordinate the project in a successful way.