Report Your News: Activists and thought leaders from Batagram and Manshehra gets a crash course in citizen journalism through Awam

Media Matters for Democracy and Omar Asghar Khan Foundation host another session under ‘Report Your News’, an initiative aimed at equipping communities and local activists from the mostly rural districts of Khyber Pakhtoonkwa with the citizen and mobile journalism skills using ‘Awam’.

This session brought together activists and community and thought leaders from Batagram and Mansehra.

The broadcast media in Pakistan focuses largely on urban-centric news owing to limited time, resources and business interests. Most of the airtime is occupied by the urban issues, restricting the content related to civic issues and governance from rural areas or smaller towns to access newsrooms.

Awam is our solution.

It allows citizens to generate video content through a user-friendly, mobile-based application with or without 3G or 4G mobile internet access, collates that content on a centralized web-portal and allows that content to be interfaced with the mainstream media.

The initiative ‘Report Your News’ aims to engage activists and civil society leaders from nearly a 100 local civil society groups from 12 pre-identified districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The latest session was hosted from 27th to 28th Februrary and brought together 23 activists and thought leaders from Batagram and Mansehra districts. The participants were introduced to the concept of citizen journalism and skills to help them produce video stories and to ‘report their news’.

One of the participants from Batagram recorded a video covering the bad sewerage conditions in the area.

If you are interested in similar sessions in your community please get in touch with our team.