cafebabel.com is a participatory online magazine with a European perspective. Based on a network of over 800 citizen journalists across Europe, it analyses current affairs (political, societal, cultural, economic) from a European perspective. The magazine is fully translated into seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Polish. Cafebabel.com is also developing a social networking community, launched in April 2007.

The objective of cafebabel.com is to create a European public space by facilitating discussion of current affairs from a European perspective. With the growth of the European Union, national affairs can no longer be taken in isolation. At the same time, “Europe” cannot be created from the top down, it has to be created at a grassroots level too. Our idea is that everyone who has an opinion, not only on Europe but also on national affairs that merit European attention, should be able to write about it and be understood across Europe. A team of full-time editors fact-check and edit each article to ensure high standards. All articles are translated by our network of volunteers, and are thus available to the majority of Europeans in their mother tongue.

In addition to the magazine, cafebabel.com is both a virtual community and a physical community. Physical debates attended by members of the network are held in a different European city every month. The virtual community is currently served by forums and is being improved with the development of blogs, forums, opinion polls and comments on articles, in addition to the current participatory-journalism-based magazine.

Readership of cafebabel.com stands at 400,000 visitors per month, with two million pages viewed.