Oh, that’s nice, you may say, but who are you? That depends on which language you read, but it’s a fair question. The English pages are being produced by five students and one recent graduate of the School of Journalism and Graphic Communication at Florida A&M University, a historically black institution in Tallahassee, Florida, in the United States, with an enrollment of approximately 12,000 students. These six “FAMU Rattlers” are working together with six students from Shantou University in Guangdong Province, China, who will provide similar content in Chinese for the project. We’ll have a link here soon to the Shantou pages. And the Shantou students do a lot of work in English, and we will occasionally have content from them for the English site, too. We will be linking to each other’s work.

Follow this link to read brief bios of the 12 student journalists. The two groups of students have been exchanging information, and each student has one partner he or she has befriended online and has been sharing information with in online video and text chats using Skype. Everybody will meet each other on May 31 or June 2, when all of our flights arrive in Cape Town. We’ll also use this space to introduce our professors and lecturers, who will be giving us advice and encouragement — and probably a little editing — along the way. In South Africa, we will be living and working together in a unique cross-cultural environment that bridges our two distinct cultures within a third culture, in the rainbow nation of South Africa, the first African country to host a World Cup tournament.

It’s an exciting time and an exciting project, and we hope you enjoy our work, and follow the events of the 2010 FIFA World Cup right here with us.