The coronavirus can’t stop our love for conferences and networking. While media around the globe are cancelling gatherings, online conferences are stepping in as an alternative.

One by one the year’s top media events were cancelled as the hashtag #CancelEverythingNow made the rounds on Twitter, dealing a huge blow both to media budgets and opportunities for networking and sharing new ideas.

In order to counter this depressing trend, the team from Slice Beta, Asia’s leading startup media conference, decided to do, as they call it, “virtual check-in” for media startups in the time of the quarantine.

They were soon joined by Outriders, a Warsaw-based interactive journalism start-up, to launch a dual Asia-Europe media gathering.

”Splice Low-Res” will appear on our screens on March 24 (3 pm Singapore time/8 am Central European Time). The main theme will focus on how media are dealing with COVID-19 and the challenges that come along with it.

“Rishad, Jakub and I have been saddened by all the cancelled media conferences this year. We felt we needed to do something to bring the community together for a chat at a time of crisis”, Alan Soon, co-founder and CEO of Splice Media, told The Fix.

“Our goal is to get people together and excited about the year ahead. We also want to learn how to execute online events well, so we can do more of this stuff this year. There will be more Low-Res coming!”, he added.

Here is the short schedule and the speaker list (times shown are for Singapore and Central European Time):

8.10 am CET/ 3:10 pm SGT— Rohin Darmakumar, CEO and Jon Russel, Southeast editor from The Ken, Indian media startup with the concept of one story per day on technology, business and healthcare
8.40 am CET/ 3:40 pm SGT — Tom Grundy, Editor-in-Chief of Hong Kong Free Press. HKFP is a Hong Kong-based non-profit aimed at increasing the freedom of journalists
9:10 am CET/ 4:10 pm SGT — Sonny Swe, founder and CEO of Frontier Myanmar, English-language media startup which recently launched its membership program
9:30 am CET/ 4:30 pm SGT — Sheena Bhalla on Google News Initiative Design Accelerator which was to foster design thinking in Asian media
10:00 am CET/ 5:00 pm SGT — Jessica Tan, a journalism lecturer at Nanyang Technological University on her innovative approach to teaching through prototyping and product design
11:20 am CET/ 6:20 pm SGT — Catalina Albeanu from Decat o Revista, a Romanian non-profit media startup that focuses on storytelling and community building
11:40 am CET/ 6:40 pm SGT — Ludovica Jona recently worked on a story called Invisible Borders. She’s going to share her experience creating this story with a team of thirteen people from 5 different countries
3:40 pm CET/ 10:40 pm SGT — Nadiia Romanenko from Topic Radar, a platform for monitoring the disinformation of news sites

The event is free of charge and you can register here

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Splice Low-Res takes media gatherings online, countering COVID-19 cancellations