Looking at new business and funding models for independent online media at the annual OpenWebAsia conference held July 13th and 14th in Kuala Lumpur.

Looking for more background on developing sustainable business models for the independent online media in the region, I attended the Open Web Asia conference that was held in Kuala Lumpur this past week.  This is a semi-regular event last held in Seoul in 2008.  This year’s event was sponsored by the Multimedia Development Corporation MDeC a branch of the Malaysian government responsible for the

As a Knight International Journalism fellow, I am working on a project that uses mobile technology to enable citizens in India’s most isolated regions to produce and deliver news.

I am sending along a video from a Citizen Journalism Training Workshop we organized in February 2010 in Kunkuri Chhattisgarh. We trained 33 tribal citizens on basics of journalism and on how to report using mobile phones.

In Chhattisgarh there are no tribal journalists or journalists who understand the tribal languages in the state.

For the third consecutive week, we had a high attendance rate, except for a few colleagues who were unable to come for health reasons. Those who couldn't attend have already sent emails asking to be updated on the content and pitching the stories that were asked in class.

For the second week in a row we had a packed room.

A group of 20 students from peripheral areas of São Paulo filled a room with only 14 computers on a gloriously sunny Sunday, and in the middle of the World Cup - worth noting that Brazil wasn't playing, though.

We touched on quite a few topics on this second lesson.

Yesterday was the first class of the Mural citizen journalist project.

We got to see the very basics of video.

But one of our students, Cacau Ras, who already has a good experience in video producing, already produced a little teaser of the first lesson.

If he's coming up with things like that by now, I wonder what he'll be doing next.

Next week, we'll come up with some different video tasks for all the students to undergo.

I'm looking forward to it.

I have for a while been aware of the ironic “equality” between Africa and America that the rate of food wastage on the two continents is about the same at 30 to 50 percent: In America it is spoilt in people’s refrigerators while in Africa it is spoilt on the way to the market.

But this disturbing African reality hit me again hard in the face last month as we were gathering information about the Tanzania dairy industry ahead of the Milk Week at the end of May.

Six media professionals – three print, two video, one business – have tried to absorb over a week’s worth of training, counsel and advice before embarking for five very different efforts to expand the quality and the sustainability of journalism.  We are each Knight International Journalism Fellows, a program developed and managed by the International Committee for Journalists, through grants from Knight Foundation and the Gates Foundation.

In this last weekend me and assistant trainer Fabiano Angélico concluded the in-presence part of the AT&T funded course Digital Tools for Public Service journalism.

It took place from Friday, the 20th to Sunday the 23rd at the newspaper Folha de São Paulo’s training room.