What a wonderful year is finishing, dear Babelians! Thank you to your passion we let our project advance on two big axis of development.
In February we launched the babelblogs, the first multilingual blogs in the world. In July we saw the babelforums coming up aiming at being the place where the pan-European debate can be made in real time. This e-community was a real revolution for cafebabel.com offering the chance to almost 3,000 registered members to play a central play in building the European public sphere. We saw emerging a song for the eurogeneration, plenty new local teams launching their city blog, high-quality debates to be run...
We also lived a 74% of growth for the magazine passing from 1,200,000 visits in 2006 to over 2,000,000. Thanks to your interviews, features (especially with the Europe on the ground project), analysis and more and more multimedia contents, we offered our readers a unique product attracting admirative articles in Le Monde, Oh My News, Polityka but also in Turkish, Lithuanian and other countries' media.
I want to thank all of you: authors, translators (what a beautiful job!), members of local teams. Hanna for having facebooked cafebabel.com. Giovanni for managing the more Eastern Babelian team and having started first Babelian videos. Concha for revigorating the Sevilla team. Erika and Dionizas for the quality and performance of your work. Caroline and London team for preparing a great 2008 programme (more soon). Lorenzo and all the team in Brussels: a Babelian must and all the old and new local team for the great great job in making Europe more young, debate-oriented and Babelian!
And many many danke to all our beloved editors working in Paris and Warsaw. To Prune, our pride, who won a great journalism prize. To Nabeelah and Katharina who started a silent revolution with great multimedia contents. To Fernando who showed that politics can be passionating when it is Babelian. To Natalia who managed to develop the Polish version by playing a great role in the community as well. To Ariadna and Marta who coordinated the Catalan version. To Anna, Monica and Elisa who worked to the Italian version with a lot of good good journalistic quality. And to Jane who just started coordinating the French version bringing her enthousiasm and professionalism. Grazie mille as well to Alex, of course, for his chakalian enthousiasm and vision, to Monika for her great job with the communication, to Vanessa for having managed to successfully launch the community. And to Julie and Cédric who joined the team during the summer in order to solidify its technical and budgetary roots. Danke to those who left the RCE team: Mr. Deutsch Qualitat Martin, Irish (soon) Madame Nuala and SuperShimon who became our Treasurer...
A great year is leaving and a greater is going to arrive. Our two jewels, the magazine and the community, will be merged with a more integrated, redisigned website offering a common vertebral column of tags with both contents from the blogs, forums but also from the magazine. For this we have to thank the web factory Oxys with David, Julien and Jean-Hugues working from Southern France. We will also work more on multimedia, on quality of the magazine and on Babel Reporter, a brand new 'press agency' project. In 2008, thanks to this vision and our community, the European public opinion will become more and more a reality. A step more towards 2009 European elections where cafebabel.com is in the first line to play a main role as the place for translational debate. Stay tuned!
Adriano
Spock
Chakal
OLé
Csacsillus
Cédric
Jane
Katha
Picon
Alberti
Nabeelah
f.barca
marysia
Julie