From Rural to Global: New Approach by the OFW Journalism Consortium

TODAY, on Migrant Workers’ Day, we give you something new.

This is the new and refurbished news website of the OFW Journalism Consortium. Readers will perhaps know the Consortium as the provider of free, quality reportage and features on overseas Filipinos’ issues. You can find our stories published in Filipino-run newspapers, online newssites and some broadcast outfits based in the Philippines and abroad.

Refurbishing this website, admittedly, should have been done a long time ago by this volunteers-run global nonprofit media service for overseas Filipinos.

But the Consortium will offer new things to our readers.

These new things will come up in our website slowly (so please visit our site often). For now, we will now have a breaking news section that aims to share overseas Filipino-related stories that are fit for technology-savvy news readers.

But the new features of the OFW Journalism Consortium’s website will be uploaded piece-by-piece–until we reach December 18, International Migrants’ Day, when the complete features of the news website are ready to give the mainstream media a run for their money.

While the Consortium will continue to provide quality migration journalism, it will use the news website to link Filipinos abroad to their rural birthplaces. The Consortium will try to employ content agglomeration techniques to connect the rural hometown to the destination country–to know more about Filipinos found in a certain country, and news affecting migrant families in their agricultural birthplaces.

Thus saying, “from rural to global”: that’s new! Many shy away at rural areas, but statistics show that many of our migrant workers and overseas permanent settlers come from rural areas. Plus, their remittances go there primarily. Thus saying, information about overseas Filipinos in these areas is abundant and under-reported.

The market is that wide –from rural to global. Quality journalism can be done down there, no matter the real, visible constraints in rural areas.

So by connecting the rural to the global, we hope that information the OFW Journalism Consortium provides will make a difference: make migrant families save money regularly and make wise hometown investments; compel local authorities to go after individuals who illegally recruit rural folk; bring together migrant children from a neighborhood to talk about their common issues; and let local development planners realize that overseas Filipinos as development actors are just under their noses. Those things are new to many people in rural Philippines.

But for overseas Filipinos and stakeholders in the migration-and-development community, there’s something new that we are happy to tell you.

This news website is yours –yours to use, yours to maximize, yours to say “hi” to your relatives out there and back home, yours to advertise, yours to connect migrant issues to each other, yours to tell your stories –in written or visual forms. Please, do bank on the OFW Journalism Consortium’s platform: Just drop us a line.

Credible, nicely-packaged “Stories for the faraway Filipino” will continue to be the mantra of the OFW Journalism Consortium. Savor them more here online.

Jeremaiah M. Opiniano
on behalf of the women and men of the OFW Journalism Consortium