• Opinion by Sabina Zaccaro
• Wednesday, December 14, 2011
• Inter Press Service

'The journalists who turned the world over. Voices of another information'. It is the title of a book published recently in Italy, telling the story of the IPS-Inter Press Service News Agency.

It is a choral story told by one hundred voices between journalists and key global protagonists of the last 50 years. Heads of States, Nobel Prize Laureates and long-time correspondents give personal memories of the distinctive story of IPS, which is today the world's leading news agency on issues such as development, environment, human rights and civil society.

At the time of its creation in 1964, IPS' clear goal was to fill the information gap between Europe and Latin America through a snail mail-borne feature news service. It was to this end that a non-profit international cooperative of journalists by the name of IPS was founded by Italian- Argentinean economist Roberto Savio and Argentinean political scientist Pablo Piacentini.

As it grew, IPS acquired a new mission: bear the hopes of Third World countries and peoples for a new international economic order and, as a consequence, a new information and communication order within the framework of the United Nations; in other words, make the voice of the voiceless heard. To many external observers it looked like a utopian initiative. IPS has always believed in the role of information as an agent of change, and as precondition for lifting communities out of poverty and marginalization. Its historic mission is in fact 'giving a voice to the voiceless', acting 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, promoting a new international information order between the South and the North.

'Since the invention of the telegraph, global news agencies have oriented - and conditioned - our own vision of the world, and their vision was a reflection of the interests of the powerful nations,' said Roberto Savio. 'Following the Second World War in fact, 94 per cent of the stories on foreign affairs came from four sources only: Associated Press, United Press International, Agence France Presse and Reuters. Their coverage was mainly limited to the Cold War dualism, with no editorial space for the new emerging realities resulting from decolonisation.'

Since those times, IPS journalists report the processes behind the facts, as the sole possible lens to read the changing global scenario. Ignacio Ramonet, a longtime friend of IPS, defines the news agency as a valid and original voice in the current media upheaval 'This demonstrates that, even in this new context of the digital information, such form of resistance is possible,' he said.

Many things have changed since the times of snail mail and telex communications, but not the inequalities and imbalances that gave birth to IPS. New media, new ways of communication, bring not just new dangers of alienation and discrimination, but also new opportunities for making the process of communication a truly horizontal exchange between peoples and nations. 'IPS has always privileged the view of civil society rather than the big personalities and powers, but now more than ever the way we see (and read) the world is horizontal,' writes Mario Lubetkin, IPS General since 2002. 'We do not consider communication and information as a simple relation between the message's sender and those who receive it, it is rather an interactive circulation of communication, which is now even more immediate thanks to the internet.'

Lubetkin writes that IPS' challenge ahead is to adapt to a changing information world while keeping the values of its original mission, well reflected in the book's coverage representing an upside down world. The book was launched in Florence earlier in November, and an English version is being prepared for the coming year.

Today IPS counts 50 million pages views monthly, and articles distributed in 21 languages that reach more than 5,000 media globally.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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