TacticalMediaRoom/2022-05-12
Tactical Media Room notes 12 May
Contents
Updates
Cloud
At the meeting Bibi suggested online cloud thegood.cloud storage where the TMR group can safely share information and work on the documents together. The companies that use the services of this storage usually have to pay 4000 euros per year but the coordinators of the storage agreed to provide services for the TMR group without full payment but in exchange for something else. Bibi suggested thinking of something creative that TMR can do and that would pay off their effort to help. As an example, the TMR group can offer leads by (1) advertising the thegood.cloud storage at the events, workshops, or on the websites, or (2) persuading other companies and institutions to move their own databases to this cloud.
Workshops
For now, three workshops within the TMR activity are being prepared:
- diversity and inclusion in tech, conducted by the High Tech Tea
- video subtitling with free open source tools (guerilla subtitles) that can be especially useful for the journalists
- secure use of online resources, operating systems, and VPNs. This workshop can also be helpful when it comes to saving metadata for war-related court cases, for instance, and transferring images from people in the occupied cities to media. It can be fruitful to consult with the Syrian archive, which has worked a lot with people hiding underground. For those people, another question was also where to get the devices and telephones, rather than encrypting existing data. Apart from that, some of those who managed to save and encrypt data have also been tortured for not providing a password. It needs to be taken into consideration.
Another question that remains is what exactly to focus on within these topics and how to attract the audience that can be interested in it?
Suggestions for improvements
How to support journalists?
An important suggestion that was made is to come up with ways to help the Ukrainian media and journalists financially. It is known that they are in great need of money and grants. Paywall subscriptions on the websites and advertising, which are used as the main source of monetization, have been ruined because of the war. Besides, while some Ukrainian journalists are left without any money to subsist, the other part is in the army service.
Germany already approved the facilitation of the process of getting a visa for Russian politically persecuted journalists, but still, Russian media ask for more supportive measures for its workers in other European countries as well.
Belarusian journalists are also left without funding or any support in the countries abroad, except Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
The TMR group is thus suggested thinking about the ways to:
- raise money and grants to Ukrainian journalists
- create new job opportunities
- provide shelters and change the visa process for displaced journalists from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia
What should scholars study now?
Another suggestion is to think of what exactly the academic community should focus on now. What is important to study?
