Guiti’s history

The world and its surroundings. This is the literal translation of Guiti in Persian. And this is the identity of this medium, which was created through various, sometimes zany, encounters: in a squat in Athens, at a poetry evening in Paris, or at the house of journalists, which welcomes exiled professionals.

We all wanted to talk about migration in a different way. As journalists, we had all experienced a certain frustration with the way these subjects were treated and had the impression that ideologies and hatred often prevailed. We wanted to break that. Because it’s in line with our stories. With more complexity, more humility and, we hope, with more accuracy.

So that migration does not become an old chestnut, so that it does not get lost in the blind spot, but that it fully integrates the major contemporary issues of our time. That it exists a little less as a “political issue”, a “problem” and a “challenge” and a little more as human stories that just want to be told. In an era when experience, language skills and “expatriation” are valued, foreign journalists, forced to flee their countries where information can no longer be sought or told, in need of a microphone, columns or cameras, cannot find work. They become waiters, computer technicians, teleprospectors or dishwashers.

This is how, nine months later, a Syrian and Chadian journalist, a Pakistani photographer, a Cameroonian cartoonist, an activist, a cameraman and two Parisian journalists, Guiti published its content for the first time. The debates were long, the first subjects complicated to calibrate, the exchanges lively – but the team, which includes as many French journalists as fellow exiles, has bonded. Today, Guiti has the ambition to be the first online media for the general public offering a dual French-refugee perspective on the major issues of our society.

Because this migration issue is transversal. Talking about migration also means talking about health, climate, security, women, racism, homophobia…

So, for a more accurate, more complex and more coherent view of today’s world, Guiti News presents only reports made by a pair of journalists, a local journalist and an exiled colleague.