Coordinator of atvirai.lt is Tomas Aleksiejunas
As I don’t read and understand Lithuanian, so I quote (and extract) some statements about the project from Tomek's eMail:
The project in Lithuanian is in an early stage. Until now, they have 40+ authors who published at least one article and 100 registered member or 'could-be-authors' and looking for more.
If we touch at atwirai.it some of the more controversial topic in our country, then we attract high interest and higher traffic. E.g. there were some articles about gays and we got a huge discussions and series of articles - for and against.
We tried to provide information for the target groups (politicians, non profit organizations), who could be interested in publishing their opinions in atvirai.lt. The first responses were very warm and good. They wrote articles, but the problem is that they are often ‘too serious’. The mainstream audience likes blood, celebrities and something like that, but we do not have such articles (yet).
As all Lithuanian larger news portals (lrytas.lt, delfi.lt, balsas.lt, alfa.lt, lrt.lt) have (separate) sections for citizen opinions, getting the word out about this initiative and developing traffic was not so easy.
Atvirai.it has a daily Lithuanian blog review - so we can network and help each other to grow readership.
Tomek Albecki runs also the Polish Citizen Journalism project iThink.pl
