I am finding really difficult to take out time for blogging because of my professional assignments (journalism plus teaching the School Leaving Certificate examination appearing students). However, for last two mornings, I got engaged in two different college teaching the students basics of online journalism.

On Monday, I was at Kathmandu Central College (KCC) teaching standard XI students about online journalism. It was interesting to answer various queries from the youngsters who are just learning journalism. On Tuesday, I was at Madan Bhandari Memorial College talking about Online Journalism and ethics to the students of Bachelors’ Level.

I really enjoy telling people about online journalism and from somewhere the issues of blogs and citizen journalism would crept into the discussion and that makes me more than happy.

Perhaps it was a farce: we were there to talk about participatory media and we ended up it like a lecture forcing majority of our students to suggest ‘the class should be more participatory’. But nevertheless, the class was better than we have thought and the students, though very young at around 16-17, were much more interested than we were looking for.

‘Understanding Online Media as Alternative Media’ was the title of the guest presentation that we held at Kathmandu Don Bosco College. There were one-and-half dozen participants, mostly girls. It was something like a beta-testing for us as we wanted to learn reactions from the students so to develop a more effective course on the topics for presentation.

Broadly, we talked about online media, mainstream media v alternative media, citizen and participatory journalism, democracy, democratic media, blogs and blogging. I will be posting more on the issues in coming days.

Here are a few suggestions that we received from the students:

“I don’t think that in Nepal, blogs can be popular because the internet access is so low. But it’s a great way of sharing the feelings. So people who want to share their feeling will get a great opportunity.” – Suman

“I came to know about we media, how to be a contributor through blog journalism. I believe it will help me to sharpen my creativity since I now have a platform to express my opinion.” – Bhrikuti Rai

“Special discussion focused on other features of blog should be emphasised.” – Sabi Dongol

We reviewed our presentation as average because we touched too many issues and it was difficult for the students to grasp all of them in two-hour. We will review our course and compact it before going to other colleges for more presentations and probably encouraging more young people to jump into the blogosphere.

Our thanks to all the students, the college administration and teacher Bhuwaneshwor Sharma for giving us an opportunity.

PS: Here ‘we’ implies to me, Tilak Pathak and Bhuwan KC.

Have you ever heard a similar phrase? If not, consider yourself a novice in the citizen journalism. Every Citizen is a Journalist is the motto of the pioneer citizen journalism site, OhMyNews of South Korea. OhMyNews, successful financially and journalistically, has some 30,000 citizen reporters who can write news for it and earn a few dollars. Wikinews is another successful venture, without the dollar attraction. There are many others trying to attract common people to involve themselves in collection, analysis and writing of news and information.

Where is Nepal then? We are still at a very early stage because even blogs are late comer in this part of the world. Now when looks like the attraction of blogging is is increasing, it’s not surprising for me that somebody thought of beginning a citizen media site. [If fact, I have myself pondered the idea during early days of United We Blog! and had read numerous articles about OhMyNews’ rise. I gave up the idea after I learnt that almost 70 per cent of South Koreans use broadband and in my own country even dial-up users are very limited.] Continue reading…

Here is an example of why blogs are different; and amusing than normal writing. Ranjana Oli compiles a set of quotations from famous personalities each of which is presented as an answer to the country’s burning questions. Continue reading…

Nepal’s life is paralyzed (well not as used to in the earlier general strikes for me in Kathmandu) by the weeklong general strike called by rebels to disrupt municipal polls slated for Feb 8, and blogs are updated with the news, views and pictures of the banda.

(via BloggersNepal) Continue reading…

Scrapping the Freedom of Expression (or with that believing that Freedom of Conscience has been curtailed) has always attracted authoritarians. Authoritarians are not always the rulers; in fact, there are such people everywhere.

United We Blog! was hacked. It was the pioneer and the most popular blogging site of Nepal (the proof – it was awarded with NepalVista’s Site of the Year 2005 award). It was hacked on Saturday morning and the UWB! People – including me as the co-founder – are unable to get it back properly. It looks like we have lost, at least some, of the entries permanently. Continue reading…