Over a weekend in June, four Southeast Asian new media organisations partnered to host the first-ever citizen journalism and online subtitling workshop in Singapore.
This is also EngageMedia’s second event held in the island-state, the first being held in June 2010. This is also our first collaboration with The Online Citizen (TOC), one of Singapore’s leading online media organisations.
Citizen Journalists Malaysia‘s (CJMY) citizen journalism programme was initiated with MalaysiaKini‘s support 3 years ago. It is now the leading programme of it’s kind in the region, having cultivated citizen journalists in various countries including Burma, Nepal, and Thailand.
This landmark training in Singapore saw 13 Singaporeans learning about the basics and essentials of news reporting in writing, photography, and video from MalaysiaKini and CJMY.
After a presentation on EngageMedia’s work, I held a session on online subtitling with Amara on the first evening using videos from TOC. Participants found the system to be simple and convenient to use, and more TOC videos subtitled by them will be featured on our website in the months ahead.
A closing discussion session between all our organisations provided better understandings of how we can collaborate further in the future. MalaysiaKini, CJMY, and The Online Citizen also thanked EngageMedia for bridging and bringing them together.
For the Lingua programme, this event leads straight into a series of workshops and presentations in Thailand in the first half of July, so look out for news and updates from it soon!
If you’d like to join in all the subtitling and translation fun, join the EngageMedia team page and Facebook group to help make important stories from the Asia Pacific more accessible to the world.
Seelan Palay
Lingua Desk
