AGORAVOX The Citizen Media
Fatih Syuhud contribution to Agoravox FranceA few days back, I received email from an Editor of Agoravox – the Citizen Media. It’s similar to Global Voices in which I also start contributing. The difference is while the latter is set-up by a US institution (Harvard), the former comes from France.
In his email (sorry If I make mistake in citing the gender), he explained what Agoravox is all about:
As you may know AgoraVox is a “citizen newspaper” website and it has been one of the first European initiatives of this kind. The French edition started in May, 2005 and it has already 350,000+ visitors a month and 2,500+ contributing authors. Our authors pieces have been acclaimed by numerous media here in Europe, including Yahoo! which put our daily stories on their news section, and we really intend to follow this lead with the project in English, which started earlier this year.
And he also explained why he’s interested to invite me to join the community:
I am contacting you because we really appreciate your blog and we would be very happy and honored you be part of the English edition of AgoraVox.
We very much appreciate the quality of your writing and the originality of your entries and we strongly believe your blog, and you as an author, can take part in the launch of the English version of AgoraVox. Our intent is to favor the emergence of a new kind of independant expression, by putting together the best stories written by bloggers around the world.
My immediate response to the offer was a bit confused because I’ve just joined the Global Voices and nowadays my academic activities a bit more demanding, but at the same time it’ll be stupid on my part if I refused the goodwill offer. Luckily, the editor gives me two choices, either I contribute directly or let their editors pick some entries in this blog they consider appropiate to be included in their media. For the time being, I prefer the second choice although I don’t rule out the first one later.
But all and all, I am deeply grateful to the Agoravox editorial team for trusting me and the content of my blog to join their community. I always see the more exposure of this blog in international community will not only good for me as a person, for this blog as an expression tool, but on top of this all for Indonesia and inter-cultural understanding.
I truly appreciate your efforts, the editorial team, to invite someone from Indonesia a country with the most populous Muslims in the world yet is getting very little attention from the western media except for its terrorism and natural disaster news. I hope some other Indonesians who used to blog in English can join the community to make Indonesia better known to outside world and instead of complaining the western media bias against the East why we don’t give our voices heard and let’s see what happens.
You can see some of my posts which are also published in Agoravox here.