News
Nationalia turns 10: it's time for a renewed direction
What have we done so far
Through 2007, i.e. exactly ten years ago, Nationalia was built, and its first stories began running just at the beginning of 2008.
Over those ten years, Nationalia has prioritized to bring you a different story every day. The purpose of those articles —shorter and less detailed than we would have liked — was to help put stateless peoples in a general, ever increasing news output on the Net. We believe that, within our modest scope, we have been successful in doing so.
The digital media landscape, however, has been transformed over the last ten years. Readers' interests and needs have too, especially in a key point for us: in-depth, elaborated, exhaustive contents have been gaining some ground that, one decade ago, we could hardly dream of. It is true that some media continue to be involved in the battle for audience, for last-minute reporting, for huge quantities of clicks. Nationalia is neither able to fight that battle, nor it wishes to.
In addition, and seen from within CIEMEN, the last ten years have also witnessed the end of Europa de les Nacions, due to the association's inability to keep printing and distribution costs within its scope. This means that, out of CIEMEN's two journalistic legs, the one dedicated to in-depth, long articles has disappeared. Something needed to be done thereon.
What will we do from now onward
In response to that, and gathering lessons and experiences of this decade of reporting on stateless peoples —and of comments, reviews and criticism by you readers, which help us a lot—, Nationalia is offering all its readers a renewed news coverage starting from the beginning of 2017. It does so within four main areas:
1. More in-depth content. A fundamental change, Nationalia will no longer release a daily story, but will concentrate on two weekly in-depth, nuanced, detailed, exhaustive stories, also including more interviews and analysis. We will be seeking to offer further keys and insightsto major issues of international news, keeping the perspective of diversity and stateless peoples —that is Nationalia's lifeblood in the end!— without forgetting other essential approaches, such as economy, gender, geopolitics...
2. A weekly roundup. We know —because you have told us— that you find Nationalia especially useful as a reference site for finding those arguments and stories relating to stateless peoples that go unnoticed anywhere else. We will keep doing that: every Friday we will be releasing a weekly roundup containing relevant stories affecting stateless peoples throughout the world, whether they are well reported or not. We will keep including a good number of links so you can further explore the stories you are most interested in.
3. Debates and round tables. For those of you living in or close to Barcelona —Nationalia's headquarters— and because we want to carry Nationalia beyond Internet, we will launch a permanent cycle of debates and round tables on current, international issues that are being reported on our news site. We hope to turn them into a permanent tool to get in touch with you.
4. PDF dossiers. Designed as publications themselves and seeking to become reference documents in their field, Nationalia begins to release two series in PDF format. The first one is already available: the Anuari Nationalia(Nationalia Yearbook), which starting from 2015 lists relevant news of the year and features dossiers and analysis of the European, North African and the Middle Eastern regions —our major geographic areas of reference. The second one, the Col·lecció "Drets Col·lectius"("Collective Rights" series), is set to be launched in the first quarter of 2017: a new series of dossiers on issues relating the rights of stateless nations and peoples.
A note on the English language version
As we have already explained, these changes were needed in order to keep Nationalia up-to-date with current trends and readers' needs. But not everything completely goes as one wishes. The Nationalia project is, still, quite a modest one; our availability to have English translators —or to translate the stories ourselves— is limited. This means that —save from the weekly roundup— most of the stories will only be released in Catalan for a while, until we work out how to make English versions available on a more consistent way. We must apologize for that, and we do.
We wish to take this opportunity to thank you again for following us, for your contributions and for the interest you show in Nationalia. Despite the shortcomings, we hope that you will continue to find some useful arguments in it.