This book is written by over 100 journalists of Inter Press Service (IPS) and key global players who have supported the agency over the last 50 years. It looks at information and communication as key elements in changes to the old post-Second World War and post-Cold War worlds. It provides an insight into the idealism that fired many of those who worked for the agency as well as the high esteem in which it was held by a number of heads of state and Nobel Prize laureates, among others. Established in 1964 as a non-profit ...
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This book is written by over 100 journalists of Inter Press Service (IPS) and key global players who have supported the agency over the last 50 years. It looks at information and communication as key elements in changes to the old post-Second World War and post-Cold War worlds. It provides an insight into the idealism that fired many of those who worked for the agency as well as the high esteem in which it was held by a number of heads of state and Nobel Prize laureates, among others. Established in 1964 as a non-profit international cooperative of journalists dedicated to filling the information void between Europe and Latin America, IPS gradually expanded its outreach to other areas of the Third World and a number of major industrialised countries, and set itself the daunting task of putting the peoples of the South on the international map. In what many outsiders saw as a utopian enterprise, IPS was soon making it possible for the voice of the voiceless to be heard. IPS has always believed in the role of information as an agent of change and a precondition for freeing communities from poverty and marginalisation. Its historic mission has been to act as a communication channel that privileges the voices and the concerns of the poorest and creates a climate of understanding, accountability and participation around development, and between South and North. To accomplish this mission, the IPS journalists who have contributed to this book - and the hundreds of others who helped the agency gain international recognition - gave priority to reporting the processes behind the facts, offering a privileged window on a changing global scenario. Much has changed in almost half century, but not the inequalities and imbalances that gave birth to the agency. However, as some of the contributors note, while new media and new forms of communication are bringing with them new dangers of alienation and discrimination, they also offer new opportunities for making the process of communication a truly horizontal exchange among peoples and nations. IPS has now become the agency of global civil society, with more than 20 million pages read each month on the Web. In the words of Roberto Savio, founder of the agency together with Pablo Piacentini, "millions of young people use the Web to forge alliances and take action at the local, national and international level. Their networks are based on common values, on ideal choices, and on global issues ranging from the environment to human rights, from gender roles to democratic participation." These new actors fighting for a different world are the hidden voices of yesterday - and they take the vision of IPS recounted by this book's contributors to a higher and wider level.
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