We advance journalism in the digital age and focus on projects that promote informed, engaged communities and lead to transformational change. We believe that information is a core community need and that technology can strengthen community information, and through that information, communities themselves. We want to ensure that all Filipinos get the information they need to thrive in a democracy and act in their own best interest.
Through flagship new media projects like POC, we serve as an incubator for innovative news experiments that use new technologies to help people actively engage in critical public issues.
We partner with those who choose to lead great journalism into this new century. We hope to help speed the news community’s digital transformation; raise citizen awareness of the value of free expression; help people in all communities get the news they need; and teach and train the journalists of both today and tomorrow.
New Media
Through our new media center, the Foundation is dedicated to helping good journalists and good journalism succeed in the twenty-first century by providing training for new media at all levels: from the traditional journalist making the transition to new media to the new media journalist seeking to improve critical thinking and reporting skills to the newsroom leader managing change in a dynamic era.
The center will provide journalists with multimedia storytelling training; editors and reporters with special technology training; and leadership seminars for editors and online managers from leading news organizations to help them transform their newsrooms; seminars for portal editors and online journalists.
Community Journalism
We help newsrooms and citizens use emerging technologies to better cover and engage their entire community. We believe that citizens can learn to use digital media in ways that enrich community, enhance public discourse, and enliven democracy as we know it. We spotlight dynamic news experiences and help develop interactive news ideas that not only educate people about public affairs but also invite their participation.
POC’s UMedia is an online platform for citizen journalists to post news, videos, photographs, and commentaries on both national and local events. It is also envisioned as a network that guides both ordinary citizens and traditional journalists in launching and responsibly operating community news and information sites. Through on-site support, it seeks to help build capacity for citizens who want to start their own news ventures and to open the doors to citizen participation for traditional news organizations seeking to embrace user-generated content.
Above all it seeks to impart an understanding of the qualities that make for responsible and credible journalism. UMedia will offer numerous learning modules with guidance on how to populate citizen news sites with content, how to use databases and new technology to jumpstart reporting, and how to train citizen journalists. It will provide a unique database of known citizen media sites, searchable by town and other criteria. It will also undertake and spotlight current research on citizen media trends.
Training and Education
The Foundation is partnering with DepEd and private and public schools all over the country to teach the next generation of journalists, increase student media and improve news literacy in the classroom.
POC Youth will play a leading role. It will offer lesson plans, advice from professionals, a free web-hosting service for high school newspapers available to Philippine schools, a free news service, a partnership program for daily newspapers and individual high schools or school districts and a national ad network that connects media experts to hard-to-reach young people.
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