TodayColombia is an English language news website that translates, curates and aggregates news from non-English media sources in Colombia, delivering the best news shut off from English language readers.
The method is to select, translate and edit content from top foreign-language sources. The most relevant non-English stories are produced in English by TodayColombia staff and contributors, deployed to react quickly to breaking events. We are also a creating platform, with original content and reports,
Launched in February 2012 TodayColombia aims to a great resource for foreign language news and information to reach a wide audience.
Here’s how it works: TodayColombia seeks out news reports and articles for translation and “English-izes” them. The goal is to compensate for the decline in English-language foreign coverage with translations from quality media sources.
Content includes direct translations, articles that are shortened or fitted with additional context, and in-house productions summarizing current Colombian affairs.
In addition, the original story itself has to stand up. It has to be a story that has enough background material that allows it to fly. If El Tiempo is writing a story about Colombia travel, and if the story has too many references to things that only Colombian know, we’d have to transform the story and put in all kinds of context.
Non-English news organization gives TodayColombia permission to translate its content. TodayColombia then posts the translated content to its website. If someone asks not to use their material, we respect that.
This distribution model is a win-win: The original publication gets a much wider audience for its stories; English-language publications provide valuable international news to their readers; TodayColombia can pay its bills and keep the cycle going.
News aggregation is not new it has been around for some time, in fact you probably visit aggregate sites everyday and do not realize it. Websites like Google News, DecaPost and World News (WN) Network where aggregation is entirely automatic using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together, and JockSpin, which aggregates and categorizes most headlines automatically, but supplements with manually curated headlines as well as its own articles.
At TodayColombia news is aggregated by humans. News aggregation websites started with sites like the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.
Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what’s interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view–providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize.
TodayColombia is privately held.
- It derives its principal income from advertising on its website and underwrite events.
- It does not take payments of any kind in return for coverage.
- It does not adjust its editorial content to advertisers’ wishes, nor to avoid covering subjects that may be sensitive for advertisers.
In addition, TodayColombia’s journalists:
- are governed by a strict conflict-of-interest policy on personal financial activity.
- have no involvement in the creation of advertising content.
- do not accept paid trips or gifts (above a nominal value) that might influence their coverage. The one exception to this rule is for travel coverage, when the trip itself is being reviewed and would be too expensive for us to cover otherwise. In such cases, the fact that the trip was paid for will be disclosed on the same page as the coverage.
- do not accept payment to speak at events where this could pose a conflict of interest, such as at a dinner hosted by a company they normally cover.
- may accept travel costs and speaking fees for events such as conferences, where this does not pose a conflict of interest. If they write about anything related to the event, the fact that they were paid will be disclosed on the same page as the coverage.
Your TodayColombia editorial team.