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A Very Different Blog: The Bondy Blog

There are dime-a-dozen blogs.     But this is a slightly different one.    We all know that France, and Paris in particular, has all manner of social issues, not least the disenfranchisement of African immigrants.     This blog - which The New York Times reports on - seeks to address a number of social issues....

"They gather every Tuesday for a staff meeting, bloggers, journalists and young people from the impoverished Paris suburbs, at the offices of the Bondy Blog, named for the surrounding neighborhood. The subject of a recent meeting: how best to challenge the leader of the Socialist Party, Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, during his appearance on a monthly talk show, “The Bondy Blog Café.”

“Like in every love story, there is disillusion,” Nordine Nabili, the publisher of the blog, told his rapt audience, crammed around a table in one of the offices last month.

The Socialists received a large share of the vote in Bondy and in other banlieues, as the suburbs are known, in the 2012 elections that propelled the party’s candidate, President François Hollande, into office. But those suburban supporters, many of them immigrants, say they have little to show for it.

“At this point, nobody here even cares if the National Front is elected,” one of the attendees said, referring to the far-right party. “They have lost hope in this government.”

The blog, which was created during the riots that spread through France in 2005, gives a voice to groups often underrepresented in mainstream news media coverage. Self-described citizen journalism, the Bondy Blog regularly reports on politics and social issues, with many of the writers sharing scenes and moments from their lives at work or in the neighborhood.

The blog, which has 220,000 visitors a month, has won awards for its work, and its journalists regularly collaborate with outlets like Télérama, Elle, Le Monde.fr, Canal Plus, L’ Obs and Radio France."

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