Watching America is one of the greatest resources available on the Internet. It’s a profoundly uniquely designed and painstakingly assembled site that offers both original translations and links to newspaper articles and opinion pieces on America — unfiltered by comments or opinions of its website owners.
It’s the closest to hiring your own translators and political officers to give you original source material so you can keep tabs on what’s going on around the world.
And now Watching America is starting a major 6 week fund-raising drive, a must given the huge amount of time its staff puts into it:
WatchingAmerica.com was launched in January 2005, and since then, we have translated thousands of articles from newspapers that most Americans have never been able to read before, from the most renowned news sources in their countries of origin.
When we had the idea for the site two and half years ago, we had hoped soon to have sufficient traffic to fund the project through advertising – but despite all the attention that our work has garnered, we haven’t yet reached that milestone.
So we are asking our readers – without whom our work is meaningless – to support us as we build our traffic and commercial viability. We calculate that just $30,000 will fund another year of our work, providing global perceptions of the United States.
Read the rest — and donate to a worthy cause…a website that anyone of any party, age or profession can go to to read original source materials from all over the world, seeing what “they” think without any filtering or commentary from writers. Just the raw material so you can truly see how some others perceive America, updated constantly with pieces translated from many different languages.
What it’s all about is best expressed by co-founders Robin Koerner and William Kern:
Help maintain Watching America as a unique and independent source. Our work arises from a passionate belief in the need for greater mutual understanding among the peoples of the world and for unvarnished global perceptions of the United States – a vision that we know you share.
PS: If some readers also have some ideas of grants Watching America might apply for, contact the site owners (just an idea). There is no site quite like it.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.