But to be completely clear, it’s a project that – like all internet activity – builds on a decade or two of hard labour. And the upload was just our regular update of each page to bring in all of the latest stories.

The website is our New Internationalist Magazine Guide.

What makes the Magazine Guide unique is that it’s a hand-edited index to stories that have appeared in the New Internationalist magazine over the past 3 decades.  Sure, you can Google for stories on global justice issues, and you can search our www.newint.org website.  But the huge advantage of a hand-edited index is that it is beautifully organised for you.

Of course the other question that always lurks around normal internet search is “how credible is the story I’ve just found?” That’s why the New Internationalist Magazine Guide is so useful.  On eight occasions the New Internationalist magazine has won the award for Best International Coverage in independent media.  Oh, and did you notice the word independent?  The New Internationalist isn’t owned by some corporate behemoth.  Instead it’s a small independent cooperative that exists only to report and campaign on global justice concerns, to focus attention on issues that the corporate media would rather keep hidden.  You’ll gain some fresh insights.

I’d like to give you a quick overview of how you can use the Magazine Guide:

– Main Themes – Gives you an easy way into our main concerns – from climate justice to the politics of world poverty.

– Themes by month – Starting with our most recent magazine and going right back to 1984.

– Country profiles – Each month our magazine profiles a country, particularly highlighting important measures such as literacy, income distribution and the position of women.  The Magazine Guide is organised so that you can easily track progress of a country over time.

– Mixed media – These reviews of books, film and musicprovide an indispensable, progressive analysis to help guide your choices.  Best of all it covers almost three decades, so you’ll find some old favourites as well as the latest releases.

But the Magazine Guide is not just an index.  If you find something that interests you, click on the link and you’ll be able to read the story from the extensive New Internationalist archive.  That makes it an exceptional tool for anyone who wants to know what’s really going on in the world. I hope you’ll find it as useful as I do.  And if so, I hope you’ll pass the word around to Facebook friends, teacher associations and librarians.  Thanks.

Earlier I mentioned that the Magazine Guide index is hand-edited.  Naturally the web pages are produced by a sophisticated Content Management System from our database.  But the underlying data has all been produced by hand by Jo Lateu and Chris Brazier from the New Internationalist editorial team.  They’re the ones who know the issues intimately and so can do such an excellent job of highlighting what is important for inclusion in the index. Thanks Jo and Chris.