I first met Ressa, and Gan’s co-founder, Premesh Chandran, and a half-dozen digital media entrepreneurs from difficult places when I was running BuzzFeed, a high-profile new newsroom. They often came to our gleaming Manhattan headquarters, sat with me at long tables in our cafeteria and asked advice from a US company that was leading a global explosion of digital media outlets. Scroll, like the Hong Kong Free Press, represents a different strain in the current crisis for independent media — both are digital outlets in countries now rolling back their once-robust free press traditions. The New York TimesThe coronavirus crisis, meanwhile, has given governments from Thailand to Cambodia to Hungary an excuse to crack down on independent media. US private and non-profit investment, and official political support, through the years had been a double-edged sword for independent media.

Source: bd News24 July 13, 2020 02:37 UTC