Mission
First Draft Media is an innovation engine for independent journalism worldwide. It exists to help safeguard and innovate media freedom and to further a pluriform and sustainable media landscape through technology, research, consultancy and direct publishing (partnerships). Our ultimate aim, in everything we do, is to ensure and promote the availability of and access to high-quality information, everywhere and always.
Censorship Circumvention
In 2020, we set out, at Zamaneh Media at the time, to develop an independent voice in the internet freedom community by developing a set of publisher and audience-centric tools that aim to improve the censorship resilience of publishing platforms. The goal for these tools is for publishers to maintain reach among their audiences at times of increased censorship, and for audiences to maintain access to their preferred news platforms.
451 Tools
In 2021, Marcel Oomens took these ideas into production on RadioZamaneh.com. The website has been available to returning audiences without the need for a VPN ever since. We subsequently started to spin off these ideas into a set of tools that can easily be implemented on any website. We call this library and plugin “451 Tools”, after the HTTP 451 status code “Unavailable for Legal Reasons” and the Fahrenheit 451 novel by Ray Bradbury.For further reading on 451 Tools, go to our blog.