In 2004 THIMUN Singapore (TS) was established as a sister conference to THIMUN in The Hague. The original thought was that the European conference kept growing and considering the expense of so many schools coming from Asia, it made sense to offer a quality, five-day simulation of the United Nations more centrally located to so many schools in Asia. The conference takes place in the second half of November each year in Singapore at the Hwa Chong Institution.
My time at TS was spent in the MUNITY-East press room supporting my colleague Jeff Buscher who teaches at the Pacific American School in Taiwan. Jeff and I have been working together in the press room in The Hague for 15+ years and it seemed the perfect year to see Jeff in action at TS considering the transition to come with the press team's newsprint and online formats. The exercise at TS focused on producing a strong pre-conference, magazine-style newspaper and then four online papers using a digital publishing platform, in this case, ISSUU. Additional work that the team produced (articles, photos, videos and artwork) were put on the MUNITY-East website. https://thimunweb.org/munity-east/
For over 25 years MUNITY, the THIMUN conference newspaper has been what I like to call the only high-school daily newspaper with a real deadline. For five days, young aspiring journalists have the opportunity to work as a team, functioning as editors, reporters, photographers, videographers, artists and layout specialists, responsible for bringing the news of the conference to all the participants and the greater THIMUN community. For the most part high school students are familiar with moving deadlines, where an academic teacher will give extensions for a variety of reasons. That's never the case with MUNITY. In the Hague, 3500 conference participants are expecting to read the conference news the next day and that can only happen if the printer receives the work by 17:30 the night before. So the THIMUN press room is full of organized chaos and stress and sometimes tears of frustration (and tears of joy). That first day, when 30+ delegates from 20+ countries, representing 15+ nationalities come together to put together a 12+ page newspaper is to say the least, exciting!
The same can be said for the operation at TS. The change that I really wanted to see that would first happen with MUNITY-East and then in The Hague in January 2020 is this move away from newsprint to an online version of the paper. This movement is all in the name of sustainability, moving to a paperless conference and going Green! Would there need to be a deadline? Would there still be the stress of a typical newsroom polishing the last words of an article if the work was going online and could be posted at anytime?
Turns out that, like a real newsroom, there was plenty of pressure driving the students to finish their work so they could leave at a decent hour. It was a great week culminating in four solid issues of MUNITY-East and if that wasn't enough, more work went online and the video team put together a really fun closing ceremony video.
I did get to roam around Singapore a bit. Highlights included a stroll through the Botanic Garden, an adventure through Gardens by the Bay, window shopping on Orchard Road (the 5th Ave of NYC) as holiday lights were starting to appear, a long layover in the worlds coolest airport, and having a wonderful dinner at a hawker food court with my colleague Frédérique Joubert who moved from St. Louis/JBS to Singapore this past summer.
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