Adriano Farano

Café Babel

Café Babel is one of the oldest news websites in Europe and one of the first media to experiment with collaborative journalism. True journalism lab, Café Babel has been represented in 2008 to Hearst Media Dialogues organized by Columbia University Journalism School and had been the subject of several studies including one of the American University, Washington DC.

History of Café Babel

This project was designed in 2000 by Adriano Farano and Nicola Dell’Arciprete then young Political Science students in Rome. Their initial goal was to open up the national public space to information and ideas from elsewhere. But only in Strasbourg, during their Erasmus year, the project takes shape. The objective becomes to contribute to the emergence of a European public opinion: while Europeans share more and more challenges and problems to create a common media seems obvious. Moving from the tower of Babel that is Europe today to a café Babel where languages and cultures can be a source of creativity and not a handicap, is the motto of the project.

In 2001, Nicola and Adriano then come to gather some fifty people from IEP Strasbourg including other Erasmus students: Café Babel is indeed the mirror of the first euro-generation living Europe on a daily basis thanks to mobility, exchange programs and European Union construction.

This generation is both the main target and the social basis of Café Babel.

In autumn 2001 the founders of Café Babel return to their countries of origin and create local teams. From Paris to Rome until Spain or the Czech Republic, Café Babel spreads all over the continent. But distance does not ensure the solidity necessary for a media. This is why Adriano Farano decides to return to France, this time in Paris, where he works with Simon Loubris and Alexandre Heully to structure the project. Their intuition is called pro-am journalism: a mix of professional and amateur contributions which can provide the variety of content and quality of reporting that is necessary to a pan-European journalism project.

Café Babel: the results

Thus, in September 2003 Café Babel professionalized its central newsroom. Thanks to a constant development the magazine gets a 14 full-time staff in spring 2009. In the meantime, the site has 30 local offices and a budget of 600,000 euros.

The economic model of Café Babel is based on the non-profit. The association, which publishes Babel International, is able to finance itself through grants from public agencies (European Commission, European Parliament, Ile-de-France etc.) and private donors (Knight Foundation, Fondation de France, Hippocrene Foundation etc.) in addition to sponsoring contracts (Presseurop, April Insurance etc.) wanting to associate their image with that of a quality website that brings together a highly targeted audience of 18-35 year olds educated, multilingual and mobile.

From a journalistic point of view Café Babel provides a doubly innovation. On one hand, it offers a unique European perspective on the news thanks to its community, present in the four corners of Europe. On the other hand, it matches collaboration and journalistic quality.

Every day, a young, multilingual writing composed of professional journalists is coordinating the editorial work of a community of 10,000 ‘babelians’ to offer you the best of information, debate and trends of the new Europe that is built through cross-border mobility.

Distinctions of Café Babel include:

2004: Prize of the European initiative in the online media categories, awarded by the European Press Club of Paris (with French newspaper La Croix and France Culture radio show ‘Cause Commune’)

2004: Consultative Status at the Council of Europe

2005: Prize of the European Movement in Germany

2007: pan-European Journalist Award “For Diversity against Discrimination” for a report by Prune Antoine on homosexuals in Lithuania.

2008: The European Agenda Award as ‘Media of the Year’ (the other two nominees were French newspaper Libération and the Financial Times).

Today Café Babel is published in six languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Polish) and continues to serve the goals of its founders.