Happy birthday everyone! cafebabel.com is 11 years old on 1 February 2012
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Close your eyes and make a wish. On 1 February 2012, cafebabel.com celebrates its eleventh birthday, with the imminent launch of a new website.
Video by Argemino Barro and Nabeelah Shabbir
Once upon a time, many many years ago, a group of Erasmus students gathered in a classroom in Strasbourg to launch the first participative European magazine. In those far off days, facebook was but a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. Most students surfed the net with a 56 kilobyte modem. The challenges notwithstanding, the creators of cafebabel.com wanted to give a new lease of life to internet journalism and came up with the idea of a truly European and multilingual media which would pass the baton over to the 'eurogeneration'.
Mission accomplished! 11 years on, cafebabel.com is covering the European adventure as an original, participative and European media. Each year, we publish almost 600 articles and 2, 500 translations.
Thanks to cafebabel.com more than 80 young journalists and photographers from all over Europe and the Balkans have had the opportunity to cross the continent collaborating as journalists ‘on the ground’. At the end of the day, cafebabel is a unique network of volunteers, whether they are journalists, translators or local teams which organise debates across Europe and get together several times a year for annual workshops called ‘Babel Ackademies’.
A new site for 2012
So what presents are in store for the birthday child? After a year of analysing the needs of our contributors, cafebabel.com is treating itself to the development of an even more participative and user-friendly site with a new virtual architecture. The new site will unite the blogs and magazine around a single media platform and will offer engaged users the possibility of becoming ‘curators’ of contents which particularly interests them. We’ll explain more as the project unfolds!
The fact that cafebabel.com has a party hat on and is about to blow out eleven candles is all thanks to you.
We are also grateful to investors who continue to believe in our project and who have supported us for many years. However, the involvement, enthusiasm and ideas of our network of local associations and our community of volunteer journalists, photographers, bloggers and translators, together with the dynamism of our team of 12 staff members in Paris, makes cafebabel.com a reality each and every day.
Many, many thanks to you all, and happy birthday!