FILE- Vloggers in front of the Commission on Election (Comelec) in Manila on February 02, 2022. Jonathan Cellona, ABS-CBN News
MANILA — Journalists and various stakeholders on Saturday launched a media-citizen council in Iloilo to support journalists and vloggers in content creation and in fighting disinformation.
Francis Allan Angelo, interim chairperson of the Iloilo Media-Citizen Council, said vloggers are part of the council and helped craft the Western Visayas Journalists' Guide set to be released in a month.
Angelo is also editor-in-chief of the Iloilo City-based Daily Guardian.
The media-citizen council is important to help local journalists and communities in fighting disinformation, said Janvic Mateo, who teaches journalism at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
Mateo added the council would also help them craft their own measures in dealing with this.
"We are recognizing the importance of having engagements between the media and the citizens and making sure that information we see both online and traditional platforms are really being used or shared correctly, accurately to our general audience," said Mateo, also a correspondent at the Philippine Star.
Representatives from the Commission on Human Rights, Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), the academe, business, church, the LGTBQ, and youth sectors were part of the media-citizen council, he said.
"Understanding the law is how we can protect ourselves using the law and how we can relay to the public that the council actually hears them if they have complaints and we would need the... inputs of our lawyers here," Mateo said on the inclusion of the IBP.
The council will also invite institutions and groups who were "very much interested to learn about journalism," he said.
MEDIA GUIDE
The Western Visayas Journalists' Guide, Angelo noted, would "complement the respective newsroom policies of every news organizations in Iloilo."
Including vloggers and other content creators in the discussion could help their sector and show what best media practices they could adapt, Angelo added.
Meanwhile, Mateo said, the media guide would include the use of digital media tools and how it could be best used in reportage.
"It is important that we have to update these guidelines because we are seeing a lot of developments, we are seeing a lot of practitioners. We are not limited to traditional media organizations that we know," he said.