Do you know about the problems grape farmers had in Kakheti during the harvest? Or what Batumi City Council chooses to spend budget money on? Transparency International Georgia launched a new project – Beyond Tbilisi, which tries to answer these and many other questions by bringing Georgian regional news to a wider audience.

The idea of this project came from the realization that regional news is not given enough attention in mainstream Georgian media. Regional media is also not strong enough to make itself be heard, which leads to a situation where concerns and problems of people living in the regions are often overlooked, seeming trivial in comparison to those in the capital. While mainstream media obviously cannot be expected to concentrate on regional news all the time, regional media could definitely use some help with broadening its reach. Beyond Tbilisi provides exactly that opportunity.

In order to accomplish this task, we take interesting articles from the regional media and produce short summaries both in Georgian and English almost every day. All of the news material is taken from local journalists, newspapers and information centers. While there is no restriction on topics covered, we give preference to investigative articles and news stories talking about local problems, simply because these are often the most important. Beyond Tbilisi uses three main resources on the internet: its website, facebook and twitter. We use the website to upload news article summaries together with pictures and videos. Twitter is used to spread shorter news that can be described in a single sentence. Finally, we use facebook to increase the potential reach of previous two resources.

We want to emphasize that we cannot take responsibility for content produced by regional media, since we do not perform further fact checking on the stories we summarize. However, we always take into account the objectivity and thoroughness with which the articles are written when choosing content.

For more information please visit our website at www.beyondtbilisi.ge

Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/BeyondTbilisi

Twitter – https://twitter.com/#!/BeyondTbilisi