Mashallah News - Online News Platform

Since the geographical region we cover is vast, and our core team initially was based in Beirut and Istanbul only, we had to recruit new collaborators via internet. This proved difficult as a volunteer task since it requires various skills. However, through social networks and partnerships, we managed to build our own network of writers, translators and artists from all parts of the Arab world, Turkey, and Iran, who are now fully dedicated to the project. Now, Mashallah News often gets contacted by prospecting collaborators. We currently work on gathering a budget for 2012; this way we will be able to establish long-term collaborations within our current team and get new staff members for additional positions.

Tomorrow's media will have no choice but to adapt to the preeminence of a participative web. The increasing mobility and changing patterns of readers will be major stakes for media actors during the next decade. With citizens integrating the field of journalism, we believe that new media platforms should have space for these emerging writers.

Mashallah News envisions a lab for journalistic experiments using a full array of resources in collaboration with specialists from fields such as urban planning, sociology, art, and human rights.

If we do not manage to achieve our budget goals and/or visibility goals within the next two years, we will have to settle for a more modest application of our current plan. We would have to drop the most costly branches of our activities, which are the media lab and the magazine project. But, the core idea of Mashallah News would survive through the collective platform that we have been running for nearly a year. We would also orient our project towards ground activities and local events such as conferences, film screenings, debates, and workshops in the cities we cover, in collaboration with our local partners.

Since the launch in November 2010, Mashallah News has organized 4 fundraisers in Beirut and Istanbul. These raised $3,500 and helped to finance the project until now. We have also received small individual donations. With these small funds, we managed to establish a steady pace of publication (4 articles/week) thanks to the enthusiastic collaboration of volunteer talents and the full-time dedication of the four Mashallah News editors.

For the future, we are eager to put more of our ideas into practice; this is why we try to gather a budget enabling us to realize our ambitions. What matters is to sustain the current platform accessible for free to a wide audience. An option if we fail to raise enough funding, is to continue the way we have done up until now.

Mashallah News has developed a range of partnerships including independent web platforms dedicated to the Arab world, Turkey, and Iran: Babelmed (www.babelmed.net), Jadaliyya (www.jadaliyya.com), La revue de Téhéran (www.teheran.ir), and Yaheb mediazone (to be launched in September 2011). Through the organization of joint cultural events and debates, Mashallah News has also enhanced partnerships with cultural venues in Istanbul (Arka Oda, DEPO), Aleppo (Aleppo International Photography Festival), Beirut (Zico House, AltCity) and Paris (La gaîté lyrique).

Mashallah News needs to hire a technical team working in collaboration with our graphic designers to build the new web platform. Our second priority is to expand our team of collaborators with skilled journalists to insure the multimedia diversity on our platform. Finally, we will need the assistance of an accountant.

As for volunteers, we aim at recruiting 2 persons dedicated to communication tasks (social networks, partnerships, sponsorships) and 1 person for legal advice, who is knowledgeable in NGO and media legislation.

As Mashallah News will expand during the next years, the core team will be looking for more collaborators in the field of journalism, and for volunteers for judicial advice and communication. The main stakes for the team consist of finding sources of funding and improve visibility-wise, hence our need for investment and marketing input. Having managed to gather a network of journalists, editors, translators, graphic designers and visual artists from across the region, the Mashallah Team is always eager to participate voluntarily in projects for which our content production, our network, and our innovation strategies can be useful.