I was invited by the International Center for Journalists to give two lectures to a group of South Asian journalists on digital media strategies and online safety, the first of which I delivered yesterday at my old haunt, the Sri Lanka College of Journalism. Was very sad to note that there were just two Sri Lankan journalists (from Wijeya Newspapers and from the English Lakbima) in the group of over 25 individuals from Nepal, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and other countries, who had had to complete an online section of the course before coming to Sri Lanka.
There’s only so much you can talk about digital media strategies, audience retention, crowd sourced journalism, open journalism practices and the relative merits of the leading web publishing and curation platforms jn around the 30 minutes I was allotted. Class discussion during and after the presentation suggested a deep interest in using new media to strengthen what each journalist was chiefly interested in and writing on, ranging from environmental issues to cross-border human trafficking.
