Indonesian environmental journalist Harry Surjadi has won a global media award from the University of Queensland for his work in training rural communities to use social media to report corruption.
Surjadi will be awarded the university’s Communication for Social Change award, which recognises the courage and “extraordinary commitment” of an individual journalist in using media to empower communities in developing countries, on 22 May.
Through his work with a local television station in Borneo, Surjadi trained more than 200 people living in remote villages to use mobile phones to record and file news reports. The reports are filed directly to the television station, and edited by professional journalists before appearing on a news ticker. The resulting mobile news network has helped to expose illegal logging of rainforest, forced land acquisitions by palm-oil companies, pollution and harassment of village workers.
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