September 5, 2019

As many people have noticed, WestPapuaMedia has not been publishing our original content for some time at this site (though we have continued to conduct fixing and production for many stories in the international media in this time). This is partly due to the forced shutdown of our crew after massive security costs and operations keeping our clandestine crew safe, thanks to the ethical recklessness by external non-Papuan reporters emptied our bank accounts and scared off funders.

It has been heartbreaking not being able to support the brave frontline and clandestine journalists and human rights defenders who daily face down Indonesian colonial thuggery to bring verified and credible independent reportage from behind the Bloody Batik curtain of the Indonesian occupation’s ban on international journalists, and its constant intimidation and harassment of indigenous Papuan Journalists.

However, the recent escalation in Papua resistance to severe daily repression – and since the “monkey” raids by the Australian-funded death squad, Detachment 88, on Papuan students in Indonesia – the #WestPapuaUprising is again forcing us to publish under our own steam. But to make this sustainable, we absolutely and critically need your help.

WestPapuaMedia is urgently seeking expressions of interest from international journalists, editors, translators, web designers, and media curators for assisting with the sustainable rebirth of the WestPapuaMedia platform. Please note – if you are operating inside West Papua, we will make contact with you securely – please do not respond here – send an encrypted email using a free protonmail account to our secure contact westpapuamedia_eds<@>protonmail.ch

We will be shortly starting a crowdfunding campaign to return us to full strength, so please watch this space.

Dear Friends of WestPapuaMedia –

We have been asked many times recently why we are not publishing and the explanation of course is here: https://westpapuamedia.info/2016/09/22/westpapuamedia-twitter-feed-sticky-post/

But in short, we cannot publish because we cannot ethically provide our crew on the ground with the support needed to keep them safe and in contingency should they come under threat.  WestPapuaMedia also simply does not currently have the personnel free at the moment due to critical background journalism support work we are doing.

That said, we do wish to be able to cover critical developments still, and still provide a voice to those people who need it.  WestPapuaMedia is urgently looking for some more volunteers to take on the following roles

• translation from Indonesian into English, and from English to Indonesian (with technical language capacity);
• Editorial roles for continued publication of our partner content over the next few months, cooperation with livemonitoring teams for major mobilisations leading up to December 1, as well as a few basic articles of major breaking news (no investigations until we relaunch in late January 2017 unless you wish to do them).
  

We require folks with a commitment to high journalistic standards, accuracy and ethical publishing.  If you can help, please visit westpapuamedia.info/contact and get in touch with us.

WPM needs your help as the current team is flat out developing secure tools, apps and training/tutorial resources to assist frontline and citizen journalists, with much of this needed before December 1, and of course our major work, Project FiveARM Secure Crisis Field Reporting Tool https://fivearm.isafemojo.press (we have been awarded a small grant by the Walkley Grants for Innovation in Journalism, but we cannot use any of that funding for WPM work).

However as ever, WestPapuaMedia needs your help in staving off an existential need also.  Prior to a major crowdfunding campaign in coming weeks for the new WestPapua.Media portal for 2017  – which is going to allow for much wider involvement for credible reportage than currently is the case  – we still must pay for the bills even though we are in effective suspension.  We have close to A$1800 in urgent costs coming up over the next few weeks, for the following costs – all before we can launch the 2017 campaign:

• yearly server costs,
  
• secure shareroom, file hosting and upload costs,
  
• WordPress hosting costs
• FTP costs
  
• Domain registration costs,
• as well as site mirroring and anti-DDOS requirements that need to be paid for.
  
• As well as projected transition costs (that we will be crowdfunding for) for the new portal, which we are projecting to cost at least A$7000, plus the secure smartphone and camera support for our crew on the ground ($1500 per journalist per year).
  

As we are still getting over 5-800 hits a day on archived articles, we know that WestPapuaMedia still proving very useful for researchers and for background investigations.  But we rely entire on your support for survival, and even though you cannot see how hard we are working – you will see it shortly as we release testing and new tools and tutorials.

If you can assist us achieving these goals, then your support will be greatly appreciated, and will enable safety support for frontline journalists to be developed much faster (we have significant costs in testing these tools). 

New Volunteers in the project are very welcome, and we will be re-requesting individually those wonderful folks who have worked with us in the past as we would LOVE to hear from you again.  If you would like to be involved, please drop us a line via the options at https://westpapuamedia.info/contact

Donations are sorely needed at westpapuamedia.info/donate, where you can contribute via paypal (also directly via https://www.paypal.me/donate2WPMedia ), via bitcoin (Bitcoins are very much-needed for secure payments), or directly to our bank account (which also accepts Western Union payments if you are outside Australia).

We hope to see your ongoing support.

with much thanks and solidarity.

Nick Chesterfield, Coordinating Editor, on behalf of the entire WestPapuaMedia team, past and present