As an editor, I consume a lot of media for work. I tried a few different ways to slice the seemingly mundane data that I collected in my media log and found myself focusing again and again on voices and who they belong to. Who is the author? Where is she from? Where are her sources from? Has she ever met them face-to-face? These questions I found myself asking again and again as I jotted down my daily tangle of tech and international news, NPR podcasts, and even late night “fake” news shows.

Perhaps more interesting than what I found in static (i.e. not evolving during the time of consumption) media was the information that I gathered on email lists. Global Voices is known as a community of bloggers and activists around the world – while we’re best known publicly by our site, if it wasn’t for our email lists, I’m not sure how we would have become a community to begin with.

During the first week of February, a really moving discussion played out on one of our community lists. A contributor from Tunisia wrote to the group and shared a link to a press release from the Kingdom of Bahrain that enumerated 72 people whose citizenship it had elected to revoke. Among these people was another contributor of ours, Ali Abdulemam, who now has political asylum in the UK. I learned a lot in that week from the conversation that played out over the list. Here is a colored pencil rendition of the conversation:

The increase of knowledge over time in a GV list discussion.

Each dot represents a message sent to the group. The color of the dot denotes the country that the sender identifies as his or her home. For each message, I made a rough (highly subjective) calculation of how much new information it contributed to the conversation. The line at the top of the graph indicates the total amount of information accumulated over time. In the end, we all learned about Ali’s story, but also heard stories from contributors in Egypt and Azerbaijan who had taken exile from their countries under similar circumstances. Towards the end of this record of the conversation, we decided to produce a series of stories on Global Voices focusing on citizenship and border crossing in the world of digital activism.

The second graphic hones in on question of voice and sources. While editing stories on all of the countries listed below, I read multiple stories and pieces of research focused on each the relevant issues in each place.

Percentage of stories that quoted a source in the country.

A few noteworthy findings:

Cuba: During this week, Netflix declared their aspirations to begin offering service in Cuba. Most English language media reporting on the story quoted only a press release from Netflix, which of course failed to acknowledge the fact that almost no Cubans have enough Internet connectivity to watch video online, nor do they have the credit cards with which to pay for the service. I edited a story by fellow classmate Elaine Díaz on the topic, which of course illuminated these facts.

Bahrain: I edited two stories that week on Bahrain, both of which focused on the stories of individual activists and bloggers, and both of which drew heavily on sources from those peoples’ friends and relatives.

Russia: Global Voices coverage of Russia consistently draws from social media commentary from users in the country. I read several of our previous articles in order to edit one that offered new information on a series of social-media related arrests. I should note that while all of these pieces quoted local voices, their authors are not Russian, nor do they reside in the country.