A collaborative journalism project to overcome prejudices

Tongante 2012 is a new blog project that is providing news and updates about the current Presidential elections in Senegal. Launched on January 10th by <ahref Foundation and Assaman, this project aims at sharing resources and information as a first step to overcome the prejudices that still divide Africa from Europe and Italy..

After the 26th February first round, the final run-off is scheduled for Sunday 25th March between the incumbent President, Abdoulaye Wade, and Macky Sall, leader of the “Benno Bokk Yaakaar” (“Together in Hope”) coalition. Along with a page on the timu platform, Tongante 2012 will provide daily updates in Italian and French managed by Luciana De Michele, an Italian journalist living in Dakar -- with help from a team of eight local journalists (from the weekly “Le Temoin” and the Dakar journalism school). These journalists underwent a training session about web content production and dissemination using the collaborative platform Joomla. This on-field experience will be their benchmark to launch an online weekly covering the entire country, thus expanding the “Le Temoin” print model.

Tongante2012 is a project co-managed by Assaman, an association funded by the Milan Municipality to spread information and raise awareness about African issues particularly at the 2015 Expo. Its web portal Assaman.info gathers journalists from Italy and African countries to cover issues that interest both Italian and Senegal citizens, such as immigration, development, local conflicts and current events. Actually, the whole projects is aimed at creating a better and broader understanding of each other’s viewpoints in order to overcome prejudices and differences that still hinder a global and shared culture. In this perspective, Tongante 2012 and timu proved to be the perfect combination to activate a collaborative journalism project to challenge the status quo and increase people participation.

Lorenzo Bagnoli

Assaman\Tongante2012