MANILA, Philippines – On World News Day, Sunday, September 28, Philippine news organizations launched a collaborative project to share stories and engage communities on a shared platform that seeks to build a sustainable future for news.
The 65-member Philippine Press Institute (PPI), SunStar Cebu, Daily Guardian, and Rappler have jointly created public chat rooms on the Community platform that will cater primarily to news readers and anyone interested in citizen empowerment.
The chat rooms are a first step towards building a robust alternative platform that is not controlled and managed by giant tech companies. It will allow newsrooms to directly engage with their diverse communities, share each other’s stories, and hold vibrant discussions on public interest issues.
The Community platform hosting these chat rooms is built on the Matrix protocol, an open protocol for decentralized, secure communications. One feature of this is that, unlike the most commonly used messaging platforms run by just one company, the Matrix is a network of independent servers.
‘Radical collaboration’
Rappler CEO and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa calls the partnership “radical collaboration.” (READ: [ANALYSIS] The future of news)
Through these chat rooms, journalists of PPI, SunStar Cebu, and Daily Guardian can be tagged by chat room members. The journalists can also make announcements or send alerts about major stories, through notifications to their chat room members.
SunStar Cebu director of editorial oversight and corporate affairs Nestor Ramirez said their newsroom decided to join the platform of journalist-run chat rooms because it “shares the goal of strengthening independent journalism” and fighting disinformation.
“As a newsroom, SunStar has always embraced innovation to improve journalism and the dissemination of information, we see that the Community platform will provide an opportunity to engage with readers in new and meaningful ways,” said Ramirez.
“Through the envisioned chat room, SunStar aims to create a trusted digital space where audiences can connect with journalists, share insights, and raise community concerns. The goal is to strengthen community ties, build trust, and empower readers as active partners in sustaining quality journalism,” he added.
PPI executive director Ariel Sebellino, meanwhile, said the Community platform is another way for PPI and its member news organizations to engage with their readers.
“It’s high time for PPI to diversify outside of its own news platform, News Commons. The strategic collaboration will benefit the community press as it strengthens their positions in their respective communities as catalysts for change,” he said.
“We are looking forward to a robust engagement with organic users, real people that have a stake in setting the news agenda,” added Sebellino.
SunStar and Daily Guardian are also members of PPI. Apart from these two news outlets, other PPI member organizations joined the consultations, namely: Ang Palawan News, Batangas-based Balikas, Herald Express from Baguio, BicoldotPH, Mindanao Observer, Mindanews, and Bulacan-based Mabuhay.
In a joint message for World News Day, Daily Guardian editor-in-chief Francis Allan Angelo stressed the importance of strengthening local journalism.
“Local journalism is the bedrock of a healthy community. National news tells us what’s happening in the country, but local news tells us what is happening to us, on our streets, in our city halls, municipal halls, in our capitols, and even in our schools,” said Angelo.
Join the chat rooms
PPI is the national association of newspapers, founded in 1964 and reactivated in 1987 after the Marcos martial law regime. Their chat room can be accessed here. The chat room is an offshoot of the PPI’s initiative, PPI News Commons, a website that aggregates all the articles and content of PPI member news organizations, in a digital format.
SunStar is a longtime newspaper born in Cebu. You can join their chat room here.
Daily Guardian is based in Iloilo but has news bureaus in Manila, Antique, Bacolod, Guimaras, Kalibo, and Roxas. Their chat room can be found here.
Independence from big tech platforms
In meetings before the launch, Glenda M. Gloria, executive editor of Rappler, said that newsrooms must no longer look at each other as competition in the face of bigger threats: AI-generated summaries of search engines like Google; opaque algorithms like that of Facebook or TikTok that have made news and journalism appear less and less on people’s feeds; and the decline of advertising as bread and butter for newsrooms.
The editors of the four news organizations said that the Community platform will enable them to cultivate a healthier relationship between people and the news, one in which people actively seek out the news and connect with journalists in ways that build trust and confidence.
The goal is to create a space where people can find engaged citizens and avid news readers, without the profit-driven algorithms that have so far dictated the experiences of social media users.
The Community platform is free. Joining chat rooms there only requires user registration.
The chat rooms of PPI, SunStar, and Daily Guardian will also be viewable from the websites of the news organizations.
To access their chat rooms on a smartphone, downloading the Rappler app is required since it is currently the only mobile app that hosts the Community platform. But this Community platform can also be directly accessed through desktop, here.
A vision for engaged journalism
The Community chat rooms of the four news organizations will allow for the following:
- PPI, Daily Guardian, SunStar, and Rappler will be able to sustainably grow their own communities of readers and supporters, and engage directly with them without the mediation of big tech platforms that have often acted against the interest of journalism.
- The four organizations will be able to recirculate their journalism with one another. This includes sharing articles with each other’s communities, thereby growing circulation of one another’s content and allowing each of the news organizations to find a new community of readers.
- Inter-newsroom collaboration for investigative journalism and crowdsourcing is now made easier. With public chat rooms on the same platform, PPI, Daily Guardian, SunStar, and Rappler can launch crowdsourcing campaigns together and do joint investigations or projects, leveraging the power of their combined communities.
Just the beginning
This collaboration is only the beginning. With more newsrooms, and possibly even civil society organizations, joining the Community platform, the vision is to create a viable alternative to the currently dominant social media platforms.
The four news organizations believe that cultivating direct audiences and sharing communities will strengthen local journalism, at a time when local news is fighting for survival.
“When we support local journalism, we are investing directly in transparency and a stronger democracy at the very grassroots of our country,” said Daily Guardian’s Angelo.
All over the Philippines, local news outlets have been closing shop while even large networks have had to do massive layoffs just to stay afloat.
By redistributing content, bolstering each other through shared audiences and communities, this newsroom collaboration aims to bolster local journalism by innovating together. (Via Rappler.com)
