Ref News Initiative
Reference News
Introduction
Reference News is
a tech idea that was crafted initially out of frustration to the fact main
stream media will never have the capacity to capture news everywhere and
anywhere. This would leave the people with stories worth being told left out,
with no ability to tell their story in their locality let alone to the world –
this would render many people voiceless!
Overview & Motivation
The outbreak of
Covid-19 has put a strain on governments around the world and is adversely
affecting particularly vulnerable communities, activists and human rights
defenders have also become voiceless, journalists are locked down in their
homes and news channels report 90% of the ravages of Corona Virus but
forgetting that other societal killer elements still exist and continue to kill
even more people than Corona Virus will ever do including by further shrinking
existing civic and political spaces. For example, in response to the Covid-19
emergency, In Uganda where up to 8 million people live in poverty[1], there was a
shadowy relief support rendered by the government to see people through the
economic ravages of COVID19 this left many to struggle through hunger for three
months – these are children, pregnant and lactating mothers, without social
security and faced with domestic violence, Hungarian Parliament recently
granted PM Viktor Orban the power to rule by decree, in a country that has
already witnessed considerable restrictions on democratic spaces; in Colombia,
shifting governmental priorities in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency have
left rural and indigenous communities unprotected, thus facilitating the
targeting of their leaders by illegal armed groups; Chinese activists who
denounced the government’s approach to tackling the pandemic have been
incarcerated for subversion; Algerian civil society organizations have
denounced a government clampdown on anti-regime protesters taking place while
the world is distracted by the pandemic. These are only some of the challenges
that have resulted from the emergency framework adopted by several governments
in response to the spread of Covid-19 but many untold stories are still out
there. We want to empower people to be their own news anchors and tell the
stories around them, to empower freelance journalism to journalists who might
never be hired by a media house, to empower media houses to keep reporting news
supported by their entire workforce while they stay at home.
At the same time, the pandemic
has bred new responses, and forms of both local and global solidarity, that either build on existing, positive official or unofficial responses to the virus or compensate for a lack thereof. For
example, media activists in Brazil, Perú, South Sudan and
elsewhere are sharing public health information in their communities, in
the
form of comics,
videos
or cartoons; civil
society organizations
across Latin America are encouraging human
rights workers to participate in therapeutic sessions where they can share their feelings
through art, whether in the form of artifacts, stories or music.
Against this
backdrop, and the obstacles to accessing reliable information regarding how responses to the virus are affecting
civil society, synergies between activists and artists are more important than ever. For example, art in all its
forms amplifies
activism and facilitates conveyance of key messages and information,
which may compensate for the lack or manipulation
of official narratives. Where civic spaces have shrunk, people sourced news can provide an alternative venue for activists to broaden their movements and support their work despite curtailed democratic spaces. The imaginative spaces that news
by people offers
can bypass traditional barriers that governments may erect in an attempt to stymie civil society activism,
for example, by conveying ambiguous or subtle messages. We recognize that the many
news reporters will view stories in different perspectives but in these perspectives
the truth will be drawn and fake news will be filtered, marked and condoned, – as such we will be flexible in how we let people tell their news but we will be
attentive to inaccurate and damaging news, flag it that every time anyone wants
to read fake news the first notification they get is that it is what it is –
FAKE NEWS and we shall apply these categories
of measures to control and regulate how people post news to help worthwhile
stories have a field day.
[1] https://www.pwc.com/ug/en/assets/pdf/ug-economic-outlook-2018.pdf
Theory of Change
In a world where we have mixed stories, we are
placing Ref as the mediator, to help us escape the news told by anti-government
media and pro-government media, to allow you tell the news in its perfect sense
and also take responsibility for your news. This will allow the stories from a
remote village like Luuka to be told because CNN might just never make it to
anyone’s doorstep in Luuka. We will truly tell world news and with COVID19
getting people locked down, we know that many will be empowered to either get
help or fight a bad situation or get a new grand idea that will help society.
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