For the first time in ten years, WestPapuaMedia is taking a break from regular publication over the next few months as we focus on improving our infrastructure, and work on several innovative new projects that will support credible, quality journalism on the ground in West Papua.
We feel without a current sustainable funding base and savings in the bank, we are unable to ethically provide the correct amount of support currently needed for our brave clandestine stringers and journalists to expose themselves in the field at this point. We are working hard to create the mechanisms so that they are armed always with real time digital security and support when they do venture into the field, and are able to report safely. These mechanism of course, we are working hard to develop so that anyone who needs to tell a story of their world – in Papua to begin with – is able to do so, and have their voice heard, and treated with respect.
Currently the amount of fake media, recycled
and out of context torture photos and misreporting is creating a situation where social media is now dismissed by the powerful around the world as rumour and propaganda. The work we are doing over the next few months is going to support the capacity of West Papuan people inside West Papua to get their own voices heard with the stories they want to tell. Not the stories that outsiders want told for their own clickbait donation agendas, or misreported, or not told full stop.
We want to be able to support every rally, every campaign, and to be able to tell every story West Papuans want to tell the the world, especially of those sectors of the population that don’t get a voice currently.
We will of course continue to assist foreign journalist to bypass the media ban in West Papua by assisting with SAFE organisation and fixing for undercover stories. However our main focus is to continue our pioneering work of the last ten years ensure that Jakarta’s Foreign Media Ban is redundant, through the effective and strong real time multimedia reporting capacity of indigenous Papuan journalists is supported.
So our current work over the next few months will be focused on organising West Papua Media’s back archives, our digital media assets, and also restructuring our project to deliver a more robust, intuitive and involving website, with the ability for people on the ground to collaborate with us, safely, with their identities and locations safe.
We will be creating an innovative new digital asset library, with new technologies of verification and safe asset tracking (that will not put the creator’s security at risk) that will ensure that any creative content, whether photos, videos, or any content and artwork provided to us, will be able to be tracked across the internet, and to enable licensing that will mean money will flow back to the creators so they can sustain their work (and get new equipment etc), or to enable training and supply to new witness journalists to operate effectively and safely.
We have a big checklist of tasks to get through, and welcome anyone’s assistance to make this a reality. Please contact us via our contact page if you would like to assist. You can of course donate to us via a variety of methods, just visit westpapuamedia.info/donate . We really need your generous financial support to enable this to be reborn in early 2017. A major crowdfunding campaign will begin late October, and will will be on a contributor and collaborator hunt – especially those who would like to mentor and support individual Papuan journalists in their continued development.
Until then, our work includes:
- rewriting and translating for our side project “eyeSAFEMoJO – the Safe Witnesss Journalism Project“, which can be found at isafemojo.press , with tasks including:
- a list of SAFEApps for enabling journalists and human rights workers on the ground in Papua to collect information safely using mobile tools, without threat of state surveillance and threats by using these unsafe apps and social media;
- A new Safe Witness Journalism Guide, with graphical how-to’s and updated tactics specific to West Papua with lessons learnt from the last few years of changes in the media environment;
- Developing a new series of training curricula for digital security and practical safety for frontline clandestine witness and professional journalists to be rolled out for 2017.
- Tailoring our unique and unprecedented JournoTriage News prioritization system. EyeSAFEMoJo’s JournoTriage Process for Civil Resistance and Human Rights Journalism is a simple concept that adopts traditional newsroom story prioritisation, combining it with the highly effective and universal First Responder’s Mass Casualty Assessment tool. JournoTriage combines a material (Security, political, repressive, casualty, legality and impunity) conditions crisis assessment of standardised coding system that is understood immediately by journalists, human security, medics, counter-disaster and international agencies -instantly.
- and of course our major project, PROJECT FIVEARM Secure Human Security and Crisis Journalism Reporting Tool and Methodology, with which we are
hoping to transform the ability to collect credible, verified and scientifically tested evidence of human security information that can be utilised by journalists, editors, human rights organisations and International bodies to effect real time monitoring and intervention of abuses.
We are really going to need your help to bring these about of course, and will be outlining more in coming months, so keep your ears tuned for announcements on our twitter feed. Remember to please donate generously at westpapuamedia.info/donate
In the meantime, some articles will continue to come across, and you can keep up with our partner content by following the feeds on the sidebar at westpapuamedia.info
For up to the minute WestPapuaMedia tweets, please refer to embedded Twitter box below.
For crisis monitoring through our #LiveUpdatesPapua feed, please refer to the twitter box on the right sidebar. —->