Citizen journalism in action

Interestingly named, The Media Slut is a new medium covering Thailand's political unrest

Bangkok Post
Tuesday, March 14, 2006

By Don Sambandaraksa

Once upon a time, in order to run a news operation, you needed millions of baht for a printing press, hundreds of writers and editors and hundreds more support staff, delivery people and a big building.

Today, you can do pretty much the same thing with a half-decent digital camera and a blog. Of course, a decent command of the English language helps too. Live from the field reporting can also be done with a notebook and a CDMA or EDGE Internet connection instead of costly trucks with satellite dishes and generators.

The recent political events has given rise to a new breed of citizen journalism in Thailand and has lent credence to this "Asean identity" many are speaking of. Take for example, the rather interestingly named http://www.themediaslut.com/ web site.

TMS has been photoblogging pictures from the anti-government rallies for many weeks since the Lumpini rally that authorities say drew just 1,500 protesters. Now with the latest round of protests, TMS has stepped up a gear and has been photoblogging from the field with updates every half hour or so. The photos from the 26th went online within minutes and by the next day traffic had more than doubled. Web sites like tomorrow.sg, spymy.com and globalvoicesonline.com were talking about the emergence of this new citizen journalist web site.

Within 48 hours, the server had crashed due to the increased load. Issues of scalability aside, TMS was a prime example of citizen journalism at its best (or worst). Anyone can write views and opinions and have them published, but views and opinions are awfully subjective. Photographs, however, are much more objective and let the visitor judge for themselves what is happening.

I interviewed the TMS webmaster over IM (instant messaging) and learned that it was originally set up for journalists to anonymously write about anything other than their usual field of journalism, hence the rather provocative name. Anything from queues at MRT stations to food to politics goes.

The site has grown from just a small hobby into one with a network that now has writers from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was that the server is physically in Singapore, home to some of the strictest censorship laws anywhere in the world. The webmaster of TMS said that laws regarding weblogs and freedom of expression are cloudy but that facts can be presented in Singapore relatively freely, although political opinions less so.

"It's a new medium that the officials have not been able to understand, so I do a photo blog of the [Singaporean] elections and don't write anything," the webmaster explained.

Perhaps the real reason is that today Singapore cannot afford to be viewed as a censorship-happy country as it positions itself to be the media hub of the region. Many talk of a media stunt a while back where a movie was digitally streamed from Hollywood to Bangkok via Singapore. What happened was that the subtitles were added to the stream in real time in Singapore and the entire process was encrypted at all points.

Sun Microsystems would also love to point out that the event ran on its servers and the immense added value it would mean to the movie industry in terms of security and reduced piracy while still allowing for localisation.

By being a digital media hub -- and Singapore is probably the only Asean country with enough bandwidth to do this -- they would add value and manage digital streams and digital content on the Internet the way they currently add value and manage physical shipping containers on ships. Such a vision would be quickly derailed if these media streams were subjected to too much control and freedom of speech concerns.

But it was not until last Wednesday that the real magnitude of the achievements of this loosely associated group of unpaid volunteers was felt. The Centre for Citizen Media spoke of TMS on par with our nice friends at The Nation, who had also solicited citizen reporters to help with their coverage of the event.

Is citizen journalism the end of paper newspapers as we know it? Probably not, but every paper newspaper will have to act to take advantage of the huge amount of user-generated content and tap into it rather than view it as a threat.

A group of Thai Bloggers, including myself and fellow columnist Ric Shreeves, has invited Microsoft Thailand marketing director Derek Brown to talk about Microsoft's view on blogging, censorship (in China) and value creation in user-generated content. Brown will also talk about why his own blog is not hosted on MSN.

The event has been scheduled for Sunday, 19th March at the Thammasat University Faculty of Journalism. Details are, for some reason that escapes me, hosted on the software freedom day web site at www.sf-day.org/wiki/index.php/BloggersMeetingBangkok.

See you there.

Date Posted: 3/14/2006