New media for feature writing and features editing

ICTs in general 2 Minutes

Conducted my monthly lecture at the Sri Lanka College of Journalism today. Though I was told the mid-career training was aimed at feature writing and features editors, those present were mostly writers, who worked in state (Lake House) as well as private newspapers. There were also freelancers and those who worked in the Government Information Department.

My submission to the participants was that though they may be engaged in writing and in print media, even newspapers in Sri Lanka like the Sunday Times and Sunday Leader are now going with daily news stories and updates on the web, as well as branching off into other media such as video, audio and photo essays. As ever, I told participants would not learn new media through a Keynote presentation or by reading alone, and that they had to also dive into the world of blogs, tweets and Facebook in order to leverage for their institutional work and / or personal interests, including the publication of content an institutional framework will disallow.

The response from the class – and this is in fact true more of those from the state media – was overwhelming interest, a sort of liberation even, to realise at the end that one can use these technologies in Sinhala and Tamil, within their institution to strengthen their output as well as outside it, to give voice to stories and concerns they felt, but could not articulate in their institutional capacity. Women in particular feel empowered, and one came up to me today – from a leading English state media publication – and said that she was sufficiently animated to champion the use of new media in the paper’s newsroom. The government information department official came up and said that what he had hitherto learnt from his son, he now more fully understood and said that he could now even surprise his son with new found knowledge. In these and many other cases, you can see how animated non-English speaking journalists get when they are shown, by example and live demonstrations in class, how easy it is to engage with the tools and platforms I flag in my presentation with little or no technical and English knowledge.

It’s why I find teaching new media so fulfilling, and why last week I conducted a staff training for the senior Faculty and administration of the College of Journalism to develop their capacity to impart this knowledge to students who are, even in Sri Lanka, digital natives sans, in most cases, the ability to fully leverage these tools for professional journalism and also judge the veracity of information online in general, and in social networks in particular.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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