When we started working as an Editorial Board in Derry/Londonderry, it was a real début artisanal, as the French would call it. We prepared the first supplement to be published within the City News, a local newspaper, with zero funding and strictly speaking no office space. The whole supplement was prepared using the personal laptop computers of the Editorial Board members.
We were working in collaboration with a community relations organisation based in Derry. This made our work ‘voluntary’ in character. We should be the only, or if not one of the very, very scarce number of professional Editorial Boards working for free, in the name of charity. We never got any form of funding from any local/state/private agency. Yet, we succeeded in producing a supplement rich in quality material for nearly eight weeks.
This is in a context where people make use of the tormented socio-political past of Northern Ireland to get the maximum amount of public funds into their organisations in the name of charity. One thing we have noticed is that there are a number of social welfare & community relations groups around which are in a mood of vivid & impatient waiting to get funding to their project proposals.
In our case, we started with nothing, and have been successful in showing to the world what we are capable of. This does not mean that we are in a position to continue quality journalism in a state of penniless misery. We do not appreciate charity organisations capitalising on our hard and dedicated work.
It is with a view to change this state of affairs that the former Global Eye Editorial Board made a bold and unanimous decision to sever the links with the community relations organisation we were coupled with, to restart our initiative as an independent, fully professional journalists’ initiative. We are just after created The Global Village, the newest Editorial Desk in Northern Ireland. We are all professionals from across the globe, with high level academic and professional profiles. We are also multilingual, with the full capacity of working in several European and non-European languages including Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese and several South Asian languages.
We propose to edit news & feature supplements to local, regional and national newspapers in the UK and ROI. At the same time, we are developing international partnerships with media houses in Latin America. BRPress, one of the premier Brazilian news agencies and representatives of BBC Brazil, is already among our international business partners.
If you are a newspaper or a magazine of any size, you are most welcome to contact us and request our services.
The Global Eye Editorial Team
Copyright The Global Village Newsline 2007
