Look out for this Sunday's Straits Times

Well, a handful of you may have heard that a reporter from the Straits Times emailed me on Wednesday requesting for an interview with Cynthia and me on internet activism with regards to Charmaine's story.

I was really surprised by the email as I had not expected Charmaine's blog to catch the attention of someone from the Straits Times.

Let's call the reporter G.

The focus would be on how people are using the internet to further their causes. G thought it would be great to get Charmaine's story out there and hopefully get donations in. She would be featuring the article this coming Sunday.

I know that Cynthia doesn't want Charmaine's case to be brought to the national scale and subject Charmaine in the media limelight. I personally didn't want to make this matter public on local newspapers as well despite many well-intentioned people advising me to. We don't want the publicity and we need some privacy too. Hence, Cynthia and I had a mini discussion and sent a rejection email to G.

Imagine my shock when G replied the next day that her editor really likes Charmaine's story so they would still be going ahead to publish it as part of the internet activism "package". Therefore, getting our input would really make the whole picture clearer. The package also includes other examples of internet activism in Singapore.

G was nice about the whole thing and apologised for any inconvenience caused. As a reporter, it's her job to report things that she hear about.

She advised me to reconsider her interview request and provided her number.

Since Charmaine's blog is gonna be publicised anyway w/o our interview, we decided to let our voices be heard this time round. We wanted to ensure that the information reported would be accurate.

We did the phone interview late last night.

As for now, let's wait for this Sunday's Straits Times to arrive at our doorstep.