Roberto Savio
Roberto Savio (born in Rome, Italy, but also holding Argentine nationality) is a journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice[1] and advocate of global governance.
Roberto Savio’s career in journalism began with Italian daily ‘Il Popolo’ and he went on to become Director for News Services for Latin America with RAI, Italy’s state broadcasting company.
Throughout his student years, Roberto Savio had cultivated an interest in analysing and explaining the huge information and communication gap that existed between the North and the South of the world, particularly Latin America.
Together with Argentine journalist Pablo Piacentini, he decided to create a press agency that would permit Latin American exiles in Europe to write about their countries for a European audience.
The agency grew rapidly throughout the 1970s and 1980s until the dramatic events of 1989-91 – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union – prompted new goals and definitions: IPS was the first news outlet to identify itself as “global” and define the new concept of neoliberal globalisation as contributing to the distancing of developing countries from wealth, trade and policy-making.
On the initiative of Roberto Savio, IPS established the International Journalism Award in 1985 to honour outstanding journalists whose efforts, and often lives, contributed significantly to exposing human rights violations and advancing democracy, most often in developing countries.
In 1991, the scope of the award was broadened to reflect the tremendous changes taking place in the world following the historic break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Other News publishes reports that have already appeared in niche media but not in mass circulation media, in addition to opinions and analyses from research centres, universities and think tanks – material that is intended to give readers access to news and opinion that they will not find in their local newspapers but which they might wish to read “as citizens who care about a world free from the pernicious effects of today’s globalisation”.
Other News also distributes daily analysis on international issues, particularly the themes of global governance and multilateralism, to several thousand policy-makers and leaders of civil society, in both English and Spanish.
The activities of TIPS are currently carried by the executing agency, Development Information Network (DEVNET), an international association which Roberto Savio helped create and which has been recognised by the United Nations as an NGO holding consultative status (category I) with the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).
Until 2009, Roberto Savio was Chairman of the Board of the Alliance for a New Humanity, an international foundation established in Puerto Rico, which has been promoting the culture of peace since 2001 and whose Board includes thinker Deepak Chopra, Spanish judge Balthazar Garzon, Nobel prize winners Oscar Arias and Betty Williams, and philanthropists Ray Chambers, Solomon Levis and Howard Rosenfield.
Roberto Savio has published several books, including ‘Verbo America’ together with Alberto Luna (1990), which deals with the cultural identity of Latin America, and ‘The Journalists Who Turned the World Upside Down’ (2012),[10] which has been published in three languages (English, Italian and Spanish), is a collection of narratives by over 100 IPS journalists and key global players, including Nobel Peace Prize laureates, who have supported the agency.
Roberto Savio is currently engaged in a campaign for the governance of globalisation and social and climate justice, which takes him as a speaker to numerous conferences worldwide, and about which he produces a continuous stream of articles and essays.
Member of the Executive Committee for Fondazione Italiani, established in Rome, which publishes an online weekly magazine and organizes conferences about global issues.
