The present & future of media at Splice Beta

On attending a media ecosystem festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from Chiang Mai, Thailand. This is Issue 163 of KALAM Weekly, the only newsletter you need to keep updated with everything happening in Nepal.

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In this newsletter:

• Continue to help us make Kalam Weekly better!

• Trump won, what now?

• Supreme Court upholds attempted murder conviction against Deepak Manange

• Oli to visit Beijing in December

• Airline ticket prices skyrocket, MPs erect 40-foot flagpole in airport

• The Deep Dive: The present & future of media at Splice Beta

Continue to help us make Kalam Weekly better!

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Trump won, what now?

Donald Trump is now the 47th President of the United States. A feat so outlandishly ridiculous that it was played for laughs up until a decade ago. But he’s done it twice now; this time, he’s even won the popular vote, showing that most Americans actively want him as their President. He won fair and square. So what now?

Well, once the initial shock has died down, civil society will have to mobilize like never before. Trump plans to hit many minority groups hard. Mass deportations are on the cards, potentially even refugees and immigrants fighting court cases who’ve been in the US for decades. Trump also wants to revoke birthright citizenship by executive order. He plans to dismantle the Department of Education and place real-life supervillains Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy into positions of power and influence.

Internationally, Trump is going to be a disaster. Dictators will be emboldened, conservatives are going to have a field day, and people like Vladimir Putin and Benyamin Netanyahu will be let off the leash to “finish the job.” A new trade war with China seems to be on the horizon, as Trump has promised wide-ranging “tariffs” on Chinese imports. We can expect the global gag rule on abortion to be expanded and reimposed across the world despite Trump having promised to let US states decide their own policy on abortion. NATO is going to be weakened, Taiwan will have to fend for itself, and the US will pull out of the Paris Agreement and potentially even the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

It’s time to get to work.

Supreme Court upholds attempted murder conviction against Deepak Manange

On Tuesday, November 5, the Supreme Court upheld the Patan High Court’s conviction of notorious gangster and current provincial assemblyman of Gandaki Province Rajiv Gurung, aka Deepak Manange, for attempted murder. The conviction is for a 20-year-old case involving Manange and arch-rival ‘Chakre’ Milan Gurung, where the former attacked the latter with a machete, allegedly chopping off fingers. Manange was arrested but the Kathmandu District Court reduced the charges to assault and sentenced him to two years in jail. The district attorney appealed and Manage was then convicted by the Patan High Court for attempted murder and the sentence increased to five years. This time, Manange appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Tuesday, upheld the High Court’s conviction.

Manange is a savvy gangster who has parlayed his notoriety into political power. He has twice been elected to the Gandaki Provincial Assembly and has been named provincial minister six times under the administrations of the Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML, and the Maoists. In September, he resigned as Minister for Forests and Environment, saying it wasn’t his choice of ministry. He remains a Member of the Provincial Assembly but will now have to resign and serve his time. He’s currently gone into hiding and has said that he will only surrender once the full text of the verdict comes out. Even when he goes to jail, don’t worry, he’ll be out in three years as he’s already served two years in prison.

Oli to visit Beijing in December

On Tuesday, Chinese Ambassador to Nepal Chen Song formally invited Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to visit Beijing from December 2 to 6 on behalf of Chinese Premier Li Qiang. Oli has accepted the invite, making China his first port of call since becoming prime minister. Traditionally, India extends an invitation first, but this time, no invitation has been forthcoming, showing that the southern neighbor still resents Oli’s provocations from his previous stint as prime minister. Oli had issued a new map, claiming portions of the land that India lays claim to. He even claimed that Ram was not born in Ayodhya, India but in Thori, Birgunj, pissing off the Indian right wing, particularly the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

So, what’s going to be on the discussion table in Beijing? Oli will definitely be going there with his hand out. He will ask the Chinese to convert the Pokhara International Airport loan into a grant, which the Chinese have been loathe to do, fearing the precedent it could set. If they agree to Nepal’s demands, what’s to stop every other poor country that has taken loans from China from asking that its loans be converted into grants too. There’s also the implementation agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative, which was supposed to be signed multiple times in the past but never materialized. Here, too, Nepal wants grants and soft loans, while China is insistent on just loans.

I predict the visit will be more about optics than substance, as is often the case. I doubt Oli will get what he went for, but the Chinese will put on a good show to irk the Indians. The Indian media will portray the visit as one more instance of Oli cozying up to China and the inroads that China has made in Nepal. Indian liberals will decry the Narendra Modi government for letting this happen, while conservatives will chide Nepal for choosing China. Wouldn’t it be something if India invited Oli to visit at the end of November, one-upping China?

Chhath celebrated but Rani Pokhari remains closed

On Thursday, Nepal celebrated the festival of Chhath. This festival, celebrated over four days primarily by the Madhesi community, is performed on the banks of rivers and next to water bodies like lakes and ponds. Devotees take baths, clean their homes and surroundings and basically purify themselves and on the third day, which is the culmination of the festival, they offer ‘arghya’ — a collection of fruits, sugarcane, and thekuwa, to the rising sun in gratitude for sustaining life.

Although the festival is especially important in the Madhesh, the Madhesi community in Kathmandu also marks the festival's main day at Rani Pokhari. As the waterbody in the heart of the city, Rani Pokhari has special cultural and religious significance. But in recent years, confusion over jurisdiction has prevented the Rani Pokhari from being used for Chhath. When devotees asked Kathmandu Metropolitan City to open up Rani Pokhari for the festival, the city refused saying that the pond was not under its jurisdiction. Devotees cried foul, saying that just last week, Rani Pokhari had been opened up for Tihar’s Bhai Tika celebrations. The city argues that only the temple in the middle is under its control and that the pond itself is still under the federal government's jurisdiction as it has not been handed over following its reconstruction. Revelers were instead asked to go to other water bodies like Kamalpokhari and Guheshwari.

Airline ticket prices skyrocket, MPs erect 40-foot flagpole in airport

Incoming and outgoing flights from Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport continue to go haywire in the aftermath of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal’s decision to close the airport for 10 hours every day to upgrade the runway. Starting November 8, today, the airport will now be closed from 10PM to 8AM for five months, until May 2025. This announcement has caused prices to skyrocket, travel agents to scramble to manage ticket cancellations, and irate passengers who booked tickets months in advance. The hardest hit are going to be migrant workers, both leaving and coming back to the country. This group comes back with meager savings on cheap flights, and the rise in prices will put them in a difficult situation. Economists estimate billions of rupees in losses to the travel and tourism industry.

Meanwhile, instead of tackling this major issue, Member of Parliament Manish Jha of the Rastriya Swatantra Party celebrated his major accomplishment of erecting a 40-foot flagpole at Janakpur Airport. The national flag was raised in the presence of MPs, state ministers, civil aviation officials, and police. First, why is a 40-foot flagpole even necessary? Does the size of the flagpole measure the depth of your nationalism? Second, does Mr Jha not understand that unnecessarily tall structures are a hazard in and around airports? It seems like common sense not to put up 40-foot-tall poles in an area where planes are supposed to land. Third, why is this such a major accomplishment? What purpose does the flagpole serve when the airline and tourism industry are on the verge of catastrophic losses? Priorities, priorities.

That’s all for this week’s round-up. The Deep Dive continues after the break below.

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The deep dive: The present & future of media at Splice Beta

The Splice Beta 2024 crowd. (Image: ANT/BeyonddFilm)

For the past few days, I’ve been in Chiang Mai, Thailand, attending Splice Beta, a media festival that every year brings together the entire media ecosystem — reporters, journalists, editors, publishers, engagement managers, watchdogs, funders, and grant-makers. This year, there were 255 people from 132 organizations from across the world to talk about the current state of media, where it might be headed, and how to prepare for the future.

The festival was informal, engaging, open, inclusive, and very, very fun. It was an excellent opportunity to meet and connect with journalists and media organizations from Asia and beyond. Speaking to all these diverse attendees at the festival and the after-party each day was a humbling and often comforting experience. It made me feel less alone, seeing so many others in the same boat of trying new ways of doing journalism, new platforms to reach audiences, and struggling to survive as a viable media outlet. Despite the doom and gloom surrounding the media and journalism in general, the mood at Beta was buoyant. Ideas were in free flow, and everyone seemed excited about what they were doing and what was to come. There was little of the negativity and pessimism that we journalists so often fall victim to. As Rishad Patel and Alan Soon, the founders of Splice, put it, this is the “golden age of media.”

As journalists and media practitioners, we’ve long placed ourselves in positions of power and privilege as the ones who dole out information to the public. We rarely asked our audiences what they were interested in, choosing instead to provide content that we expected them to consume, like it or not. And they did so quietly, until the information age and social media arrived. Now, audiences could choose what they liked and what they didn’t. The legacy media — newspapers, television, radio — were no longer the arbiters of information. The equation had flipped, and most mainstream media outlets failed to recognize this. However, Splice presents a radically different approach, one that envisions the media as a service industry, as hospitality. As they put it, “The strongest media businesses understand that people don't buy journalism — they buy ways to solve problems they face, a way to improve their lives, a painkiller, status, to feel important.” Media is no longer a one-way street. Audiences want to be seen and heard.

How do we serve our audiences, our communities best? By recognizing that each audience is unique. In the internet age, we are often conditioned to think that the entire world is our audience but the reality is the opposite. Our audiences are segmented; they are niche. The internet is siloed off into communities that pursue individual interests. A one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work anymore. Now, it’s one-size-fits-one. Each individual, each community must feel seen. The media that survives this day into the next must recognize that audiences are no longer monolithic (if they’ve ever been) and homogeneous; they are unique, and they all have specific needs. We in the media must meet those needs.

I felt comfortable at Splice Beta, even though I’m not the most outgoing person. It was easy to talk to strangers as we all worked in some way in or with the media. Conversations began with a simple introduction of yourself, where you were from, and what organization you worked for before spiraling into much larger discussions on how to serve audiences better, build communities, get paid, and sustain ourselves. We were all in the same boat, and while many outside might think it’s sinking, we’re doing all we can to plug holes, stay afloat, and continue to wherever we’re going.

Here’s a very non-exhaustive list of people I (re)connected with at Splice. They’re all doing interesting, unique work that deserves a wider audience so please check out their work:

Roman Gautam: Roman is the chief editor of Himal Southasian and a long-time friend and supporter of this newsletter. Himal is a regional magazine covering all of Southasia with a 37-year history. It used to be headquartered in Kathmandu before leaving for Colombo due to governmental pressure. It now functions as a digital outlet with a team working remotely from across the region. Himal, too, needs your support, so pledge a subscription if you can.

Maya Misikir: Maya is an Ethiopian journalist who writes a weekly newsletter called Sifter. Maya’s newsletter covers the top five human rights stories from Ethiopia, providing context and analysis. She started her newsletter after being frustrated working as a freelance journalist for global publications that don’t seem to understand Ethiopia nor care to. Read her newsletter here.

Zakaria Zainal: Zakaria — also known as Zak or Jit Bahadur Thapa Magar — is a photographer from Singapore who worked at a Nepali publication as an intern during his college days. He has returned to the country often, and was even present in Kathmandu during the 2015 earthquakes, an experience that should confer honorary Nepali status on him. Zak is most famously the author of Our Gurkhas, a photo project documenting the stories of Nepalis who served in the Gurkha Contingent of the Singapore Police Force. You can see some of his images here.

Simon Allison & Refiloe Seiboko: Simon and Refiloe are part of the team that runs The Continent, a pan-African newspaper designed to be read exclusively on WhatsApp. Every week, The Continent sends out a PDF over WhatsApp and other social media platforms that looks like a traditional newspaper, complete with columns, headlines, bylines, and subheads. Its innovative way of reaching audiences has led to hundreds of thousands of readers from across Africa and abroad. Click this link to subscribe to them over WhatsApp.

Ahmed Naish & Nur Thoufeeq: Ahmed and Nur are part of the Maldives Independent, a newspaper that shut down in 2020 due to persecution from the Maldivian government. One of its reporters disappeared, threats were made, and the editor was forced to flee the country, all in response to its coverage of a money laundering scheme involving the administration of then-Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen. Now, with Yameen out of power, they are trying to make a comeback.

Deborah Augustin: Deborah is a writer and media strategist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She’s worked in audience engagement and membership management but is also a journalist and fiction writer. We went to college together and managed to connect in Chiang Mai at Splice Beta more than 12 years later! You can check out her work here.

Dexter Chan: Dexter is a Malaysian journalist who is really into data. His company, Mediagraphy, is the first data journalism outlet in the Chinese language. He attempts to explain complex issues using data, illustrations, and infographics. I would love to emulate that in this newsletter, too.

I know this newsletter sometimes veers into despondency. It’s a natural response to living and working in Kathmandu, especially in the media industry. In Kathmandu, my conversations with other journalists and media industry folk end in pessimism and a growing sense that things might be too far gone. But this time, at Beta, I didn’t feel down. It felt like I’d found people just as passionate as I was about putting work out there and finding audiences who appreciate what we do. There were harsh truths to internalize, like how the future of media is “not news-centered, ad-driven, and content-based but user-centered, demand-driven, and interest-based.” For many of us traditional journalists, this can be anathema. There are many things we need to unlearn and many that we need to relearn. Beta showed that the media future does not have to be dark and foreboding. It can be inspiring, engaging, full of opportunity. We just have to be willing to adapt.

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That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of KALAM Weekly.

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