The Viewspaper is India's largest youth paper. It’s a combination of blogs, newspaper, social networks and a magazine, focusing on various subjects, such as politics, arts, education, sports, and entertainment. It’s seen by more than 150,000 readers a month and publishes daily articles written by youth staff. Based on citizen journalism concept, it allows young people from around the world to express their views and thoughts to change the mindsets of people. It aims to become a part of a growing revolution, encouraging youth to think further and become responsible citizens of the country.
Founded by Shiv Bhaskar Dravid in 2007, driven by the disconnection between young and older generations, The Viewspaper now succeeds in combining the power of blogs, social networks and community, highlighting the important factors which can bring the change in the society. Despite it’s relatively young age, The Viewspaper has been able to compete with other newspapers in the market, and been credited in creating a platform for the youth and a new niche in media. In the last couple of months Shiv has also moved the idea further beyond India: The Viewspaper has soft launch of its U.K. edition available while U.S. and Dubai editions are already on the drawing board. Views TV, courses in writing and an online school of journalism are also some of the next steps in expansion.
The Viewspaper seems to have an active Facebook community and lots of young people participating and commenting on the topics. It is easy to read the articles, but finding info about writing to the site is difficult. The site also uses Facebook plugins for commenting and writing the articles - so how about the people not in Facebook?
About making a concrete change to the world, The Viewspaper aims to bring about social change by consolidating the opinions of the youth on current events and relevant topics, based on the assumption that when lots of young people express their views on the same subject at the same time, the conversation has the potential to be a catalyst for change. I’d like to hear more about concrete examples of changes the site has made to people's lives to contemplate, how potential category/overall winner could it be compared to other nominees.
Links:
Website: http://theviewspaper.net
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/viewspaper
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/TheViewspaper
Much like write3 this project is moving in the right direction helping people to be heard (as in many of the Youth Award projects). In that way every little bit helps and they certainly have a charismatic person heading this project.
ReplyDeleteIt's seems they've made a good start reaching people so far but like Sanna suggested there are people outside Facebook and of course access to the service is another challenge. This point also stands for Write3.