RConversation

Why Hong Kong needs Creative Commons

Joi Ito - who is among other things Chairman of the Board of Creative Commons - passed through Hong Kong this week. Yusuf Goolamabbas over at Outblaze did a quick interview with Joi and Pindar Wong (the guy who brought the Internet to Hong Kong) about why Hong Kong needs Creative Commons. He mentioned our efforts to create a local Hong Kong version of the "some rights reserved" licenses and that we are seeking community feedback on the license draft. If all goes well, we hope to launch the CC-HK license officially in mid-June. Want more information or want to get involved? Click here.

Some quotes from Joi and Pindar:

PINDAR:

 

Weve built the number two, number three infrastructure in the world over the last ten years. So what are we going to do with it? Now, if we're going to have a not very forward-looking copyright regime that binds us, shackles us, it's quite clear that the creative community in Hong Kong - music, film, the arts - their ability to mix, mash, be creative is somehow not factored in to the current view of the law. So all we're trying to do is say, look. It's not necessarily "all rights reserved," it's also "some rights reserved." Lets try and use the existing copyright regime and make licensing - look at the licensing aspect. Not everyone by nature wants to fall foul of copyright law, but give us some options. It's not that we don't want to obey the law, its that we do want to have a license, but make it easier for us to get a license. Furthermore, give us some choices as far as the types of license we can get. Therefore Creative Commons has been around, weve looked at it we all know it. Many of us who are involved in the industry worldwide have said "hey look its quite strange we don't have Creative Commons in Hong Kong." Why not? Why don't we go and do it? So that's what we've done."

...Hong Kong is one of the freest economies in the world. So let the market decide. The Creative Commons license should be there by default. Once it's there then we can start doing things that are very interesting... This is a starting point not an ending point.

JOI:

...The problem is that the mass production and delivery of content is the main model that people want to use the internet for, but then you might as well use cable. That's fine for broadcast thats not a bad architecture... but the internet is really for peer to peer communication. And the problem is that if you don't create a legal regime that allows you to do it, people will do it anyway but it will be illegal. And so by causing people to do illegal things, its also one of these thing where people figure well, if I'm breaking the law anyway.. I might as well go all the way. So the minute you make people into pirates, you call them criminals and terrorists like they did in the United States, then theyre going to come back at you, they're going to attack you, they're going to treat  you like the man. So what Creative Commons is trying to do is get everybody to the table, get everybody to follow the rule of law, respect each other's needs, and say everyone has the right to have a choice.

...What you're fighting for right now is the attention of a person.

...Whats really a pity is that this Hollywood regime is infecting other governments into thinking that by having a strong copyright regime they will encourage the content business. When in fact by encouraging the amateur business they may sell more video cameras and televisions and network connections and bandwith, and we would probably make a lot more money supporting the sharing economy in asia than we would trying to build a hollywood inside Hong Kong.

Here's the video:

Unfamiliar with Creative Commons? Watch this then:

To learn more, and perhaps even get involved, visit the Hong Kong Fans of Creative Commons wiki.

Web innovation: Why Hong Kong lags behind Mainland China and Taiwan

Consider the following:

• Mainland China and Taiwan have both embraced Creative Commons. There is no Creative Commons Hong Kong.

• Both mainland China and Taiwan have active open source software development communities. Hong Kong does not have an open source geek community to speak of. (UPDATE: Tom asserts in the comments section that this statement is "plain wrong." Would love to hear from others on this.)

• Both the Mainland China and Taiwan are seeing much more Web2.0 innovation than Hong Kong - which appears to have almost none going on. (This is based not only on my own observation. Everybody I know who runs or invests in Internet companies around Greater China says the same thing: the action is everywhere but here.)

Why? And to what extent are these three things connected?

There are no doubt many complicated reasons.  Anybody reading this who would like to add their two or three cents in the comments section below, please feel free.

The above three points and two questions - but not too many clear answers - came up in a seminar I attended on Sunday titled Copyright = Creativity? organized by Hong Kong In-Media and the Open Knowledge Project.   

There were three speakers: Isaac Mao, mainland Chinese blogger and entrepreneur, "Titan" Deng Chieh of Wikimedia Taiwan, and Charles Mok of the Hong Kong Internet Society.

Interestingly, both mainland China and Taiwan have developed more similar approaches to copyright, as both have chafed under pressures from the United States to crack down on copyright violations more than they feel is really in their national interest.

Isaac and Titan both pointed out that all countries need to find a middle ground between too little and over-zealous copyright protection. If there is too little (which has been China's problem) everybody steals everything and there is no incentive for creation. If there is  over-zealous copyright protection (which many believe is now the situation in the U.S. and in Hong Kong) the law is used to reinforce powerful monopoly control over what is or isn't a "legal" creative work, making it more difficult for individual and entrepreneurial innovation to take place.

Isaac believes that the growth of blogging and the expansion of Web2.0 in China is connected to the fact that the Chinese take an expansive view of content sharing - some might argue over-expansive, but he believes that the "free culture approach," and a generous approach in terms of what constitutes "fair use" and "public domain," has been critical. 

We are entering a "post copyright" era, he believes. "The past was an era of macro-creation," with cultural works being produced by big companies. "Now we also have to protect the interests of micro-creators," he says.  The problem is that traditional copyright approaches - including Hong Kong's approach - tend to protect the big players while suppressing the emergence of smaller players.

Isaac said that filmmakers in China are realizing that letting netizens sample their films in spoofs and fan-works actually helps drive up box office sales. He said that Chen Kaige withdrew his lawsuit against internet spoofer Hu Ge after realizing that all the spoofing actually generated more buzz around the movie and caused more people to watch it.   Treating your fans as criminals is bad business in the long run. A middle ground needs to be found.

Titan Deng put it this way: "What's more important? The development of a rich human culture or protection of individual capital? Where do we find the balance?" What happens when there is too much emphasis on the latter, at the expense of the former? 

He made this analogy: If you open a restaurant and serve steak, for which you must supply knives, do you put all your customers under surveillance pre-emptively lest they commit murder with those knives?

For this reason, he said, Creative Commons in Taiwan is growing fast. The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office publishes all of its works under a Creative Commons license, as do a growing number of other groups in Taiwan, including several well-known musical artists.

So why is Hong Kong lagging behind? Charles Mok started by discussing the Hong Kong government's latest Consultation Paper on Copyright Protection in the Digital Environment.

Charles pointed out that the government document never actually defines what the "digital environment" is, though it seems to start from the same premise as the big entertainment companies: that the digital environment is a bad place where people break the law, and which must thus be controlled as much as possible.

Thus, because the government document doesn't approach the digital environment as anything beyond what the entertainment industry perceives it to be, it fails to address any creative or broader alternatives beyond what the industry proposes. 

Certainly, a lot of businesses are being hurt by illegal downloading, Charles acknowledged. It's not like the Internet should be a total free-for-all with no law at all. But is a punitive approach - which treats all internet users as potential criminals to be controlled as much as possible - really going to be a constructive approach?

Will that really help Hong Kong economically in the long run? Or will it ensure that Hong Kong's Internet and online media sectors continue to lag even further behind the Mainland China and Taiwan?

Charles pointed out that the Hong Kong government has not adequately considered the concept of "fair use," and how it might be better defined at very least for non-profit and educational purposes.  Alternative copyright regimes like Creative Commons are not raised at all in the document.

Nor does the document address the question of how to prevent unfair monopolies, and the use of copyright law by monopolies to prevent competition.

He also pointed out that the Internet is challenging the business model of all kinds of media, and especially the entertainment industry worldwide.

Of course they'd prefer not change their business model. It is inevitable, but draconian IP laws are their last gasp at resisting change. Why should government and law be helping them so much, when such resistance actually holds back innovation and prevents new business models from being conceived, let alone adopted?

Further, Charles pointed out that the government here is willing to criminalize music file sharing, but is not willing to criminalize the use of pirated software by businesses. Why is that? 

There was also much discussion of the fact that Hong Kong's ISP's and network operators will be required to hang on to user data for much longer periods of time, and that a result of some of the proposed measures could be greater, less transparent and less accountable surveillance of users - ostensibly to catch IP violators but who knows how else the data gets used.

In sum, Mok's argument is that entrenched industry must not be allowed to dominate and define the entire conversation about copyright in Hong Kong. Other voices must be brought into the mix in a way that is more balanced, not just as an afterthought. Or it will be to Hong Kong's long-run detriment.

UPDATES: For more on Mok's critique of the government consultation paper, read HK govt focuses on enforcement in IP legislation in Computerworld Hong Kong.

Also, one reader has  e-mailed to point out that Creative Commons "actually wanted to have CC-HK, but they couldn't locate a HK lawyer to translate the license to make sure it's workable under HK laws." Anybody out there?

Another reader writes: "I don't think the legal aspect is the only reason why Hong Kong is not Web 2.0, the whole culture of sharing, or "web culture". Perhaps you can draw parallels to the lack of culture, after all China and Taiwan are far richer culturally than Hong Kong, people enjoy their time in different ways compared to Hong Kong which is too pragmatic and money oriented."  Good point.

Asia leads the world in blog readership

Edelman the P.R. company has come out with a fascinating study of global blog readership titled A Corporate Guide to the Global Blogosphere (published in that annoying new NXT format, unfortunately.) While the report's primary audience is meant to be companies, there is plenty for non-corporate people who study the blogosphere to chew on.

Their key finding is not surprising: blogs are much more influential in Japan, South Korea, and China than they are in the West.   Here's the chart (click to enlarge):

One thing to keep in mind about global blog counts is that they are very very inexact and unreliable. The Edelman survey, done in conjunction with Technorati, finds that the English language blogosphere remains the world's largest (with 39%) of blogs, followed by the Japanese blogosphere (33%) and then the Chinese (10%). [SEE UPDATE BELOW THROWING THESE NUMBERS INTO FURTHER QUESTION] However, my former Berkman Center colleague Ethan Zuckerman and I both think that Technorati is seriously undercounting Chinese blogs. There are a number of technical reasons for this, which Ethan discusses here and here. More discussion about the undercounting from China here and here. A major reason, in a nutshell, is that many Chinese blog-hosting platforms (and many other non-English blog hosting platforms for that matter) don't bother to configure themselves in a way that their blogs can be easily found by Technorati. Japanese blog hosts seem to do a much better job, thanks in part to  a lot of hard work done by the Technorati Japan office.

-----------------------------

UPDATE (8 hours after original post): On January 9th, David Wolf of Silicon Hutong reported on ChinaTechNews: Edelman Gives Up Tracking Chinese Blogs. Basically, Edelman as of the end of last year recognized that Technorati is unable to track Asian language blogs sufficiently well. He points us to a blog post by Edelman's Steve Rubel on December 29th in which he says:

Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. In China there are access issues and Korea data quality is less than desirable because most blog platforms don't ping. That's the nature of the culture.

Therefore, Edelman and Technorati reached a decision to de-emphasize Asia and focus on Europe. The partnership was never set to renew.

 

It's strange that Edelman does not note any reservations about the language blogosphere numbers in their report.
-------------------

Another extremely interesting finding was that more Chinese blog-readers are more likely to take action as a result of reading a blog than Japanese or Koreans. Here's the chart (click to enlarge):

Tony Tao of Edelman's Shanghai office writes that "engaging the Chinese blogosphere is something that should be done with complete transparency. Perhaps more than elsewhere, bloggers in China can be extremely hostile if they feel they are being maniuplated."

I recently did a small-scale study of the extent to which the international media is influenced by blogs in their coverage of China. (I posted some of the initial results here and will share a more detailed academic paper I've written based on those and other results once it's ready.) I found that Chinese blogs and English-language "bridge blogs" about China have become a staple part of the China correspondent's media diet. Given the extent to which Chinese Internet users are influenced by blogs according to this Edelman study, journalists covering China are increasingly remiss if they don't keep an eye on the Chinese blogosphere.

Reading through the country-by-country writeups, one is struck by how unique every country's blogosphere really is. This confirms my own conclusions from working on the Global Voices project. People in different countries and language groups use blogs in different ways for different purposes. You really can't take generalizations about how the U.S. blogosphere works and apply them to any other country or region's blogosphere. The relationships between blogs, mainstream media, government, companies, etc. etc. are very different from country to country and region to region. To understand any blogosphere you have to construct a unique equation involving a country's culture, economic level, internet penetration, political system, and many other factors.

Free Expression in Asian Cyberspace

I'm at the first day of a conference here in Manila called "Freedom of Expression in Asian Cyberspace" organized by the South East Asian Press Alliance.  Chi Dang from Vietnam just told us that two members of her delegation were arrested at the airport on their way to this conference.

My colleague Ethan, as usual is doing an amazing job of live-blogging the speakers - people from around Asia who are at the forefront of pushing for free speech online.  The speakers are also being videoblogged  here. And Portnoy from Taiwan is blogging the conference in Chinese here. Also see blog coverage on the blog of PCIJ, one of the conference's Filippino sponsors.  More TBA.

Philippines: Talking and listening at iBlog 2

I gave a talk this morning at the iblog2 conference here in Manila, giving my spiel: Global Voices, international blogging, and the need to build more bridges.  This is the second annual blogger conference in the Philippines, which has developed a lively and politically influential blogosphere.

 
Afterwards I heard a presentation by lawyer Manuel Quezon about political blogging in the Philippines.  He describes several categories of Philippine political blogs which I think are useful for any political blogosphere: "propaganda blogs" (pushing a political agenda/party/candidate), "bully pulpit blogs" (the political op-ed page), "intellectual sandbox blogs" (where the policy wonks analyze what's going on), and "witness blogs" (first-hand accounts of events that take place).  There are also different political roles the blog-reader plays: observer, explainer, proposer, exposer, and attacker/defender.  The blogger and visitor can engage most constructively if they work out who is playing what role.

We also heard from Peter Lavina, a blogging councilman from Davao. He believes that his blog has enabled him to be in better communication with his constituents. Several bloggers raised the problem, however, that most Philippine bloggers are writing in English, not the national language, Tagalog. The blogosphere as an elite conversation is a concern here, as it is in many countries. It was also pointed out that the majority of bloggers here are from one side of the political spectrum.

I also heard a presentation by Emil Avancena, founder of the Philippine blog hosting service DotPH. He and a colleague introduced a cool new Web 2.0 service they've developed here in the Philippines called Calliope, which consolidates all of your content from various Web 2.0 services: your blog, your flickr account, your del.icio.us bookmarks,  your YouTube videos, and so on. Looks like something I could use.  All around Asia, local companies are starting to build innovative new social media services and tools to suit the needs of local users. I hope the ideas and innovations that emerge here will get spread around the globe.

Technorati Tags: iblog

Internet filtering in Japan

It's not just the Chinese and Iranian governments. Democratically elected governments are pushing the line further and further in the interest of public safety.   Where should the "do not cross" line be drawn?  I fear it will get fuzzier and fuzzier and prone to mission creep unless citizens of democratic countries demand otherwise.

Our Global Voices Pacific Rim Roundup today links (via Asiapundit) to the blog Riding Sun (written by a New Yorker living in Tokyo), who reports that according to the Japanese news agency Kyodo News, the Japanese government has plans for some rather assertive internet filtering. Here's the story:

Gov't to promote software to filter 'harmful' Net info

Saturday, July 2, 2005 at 07:44 JST
TOKYO — The government said Thursday it will promote the use of filtering software against what it judges to be harmful information over the Internet, in a bid to prevent such incidents as group suicides and production of explosives via use of the Internet.

The government will map out procedures and criteria for police to ask Internet service providers to disclose information on the senders of messages on planned suicides. It will also try to educate people about the dangers of "harmful online information," and enhance consultation services about it, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said. (Kyodo News)

Riding Sun points out that the Japanese government is also on a campaign against online anonymity. He points to a recent NPR story discussing how internet anonymity is a nuisance to some in the U.S. federal government too.

Digital Silk Road Conference: The Internet in China

When the internet arrived in China in 1995, journalists got all excited.  A rash of stories came out about how the Chinese Communist Party was unlikely to survive this borderless new technology. I must confess, I was involved with a few such stories myself. Ten years later, the Party is having its usual problems (subject of whole books), but no viable political alternative to the Chinese Communist Party is any closer to emerging. People who study the internet in China have found that internet communications certainly are changing Chinese urban society, commerce, and people’s relationship with their government in ways that are familiar to all countries with a meaningful amount of internet access. But researchers have also found the Chinese government to be surprisingly adept not only at controlling its citizens’ internet experience, but also in using the internet to bolster its own legitimacy. At the Digital Silk Road Conference, held last week at the Michigan State University College of Law, I learned how.

As conference organizer Dr. Peter Yu put it, if we only study the ways that the internet is changing China we’re only seeing half of the picture. We also need to ask: How is China changing the internet? 

The Context: Before going into a discussion of China’s impact on the internet, it’s important to understand the political context. As Prof. Chin-Chuan Lee of the City University of Hong Kong points out, economic growth and nationalism have replaced Communism as the Chinese government’s raison d’etre.”  (I would even argue that while the ruling party still calls itself the Communist Party, it’s more useful to think of it as the “Chinese Nationalist Party.”) Prof. Lee explained how the “post-Tiananmen” era (i.e., since the bloody crackdown on student demonstrators in 1989), the Chinese government has been very skilfull at cultivating popular nationalism. Recent anti-Japanese protests are just the latest manifestation of this, but we’ve also seen rashes of anti-Americanism during the spyplane crisis of 2001 and the demonstrations against the U.S. accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

China is on the cutting edge of innovation when it comes to filtering and controlling what its citizens can access on the internet. These methods are not perfect and never will be: people with enough time and technical skills can always work-around. But while the Chinese government can’t possibly control new media as effectively and completely as it can control old media, it still finds trying to be worth the effort and expense.  The system is good enough that the majority of Chinese internet users have a substantially different online information experience than they would if the Chinese government did not have these mechanisms in place. In other words, the Chinese government has been pretty successful at molding Chinese people’s view of the world and of their own government.

The recognition that new media can’t completely be controlled in the old ways is also leading to new thinking about how to use the internet as a tool: not only to manipulate public opinion, but also to redefine the relationship between citizens and government to the Communist Party’s greatest possible advantage.

For details read on…

Chinese Smartmobs

Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times has now posted his excellent essay originally written for the Wall Street Journal about how the role of technology in China's recent anti-Japanese protests. The government certainly allowed these protests to happen, and even encourages the rise of anti-foreign and especially anti-Japanese nationalism in Chinese cyberspace as a way of deflecting people's frustrations away from their own government.  Nonetheless, Xiao believes that the internet and wireless technology that made these protests possible will ultimately do more to break down the Communist Party's control - despite all the impressive efforts to control and filter what Chinese people can see and do on the internet.

Xiao concludes:

...the use of technology in these protests is likely to have a wider impact on Chinese society. Despite the silence of the official media in reporting the anti-Japan demonstrations, many online bulletin boards and Web blogs have engaged in lively debate about Sino-Japan relations, Chinese nationalism, and the goals and impact of the demonstrators. Many articles also criticized the crude form of nationalism seen in the protests and questioned the motives of the government’s propaganda in giving anti-Japanese sentiment some political space.

By providing space for a pluralistic debate on such a heated topic, the Internet allows rational voices to be heard, and may ultimately help aid the development of civil society. As information technology becomes ever more widely available in China, it is sure to be increasingly used by activists to bypass government control. Instead of being used as a control device to strengthen the power of an authoritarian regime, the Internet may yet play a part in forcing a political opening in China.

(See this comprehensive report by my Berkman colleagues and the Open Net Initiative for more information on China's internet control methods.)

Talking blogs at Vietnamnet

This is a picture of me being interviewed live on the internet by Tuan Anh Nguyen, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Vietnamnet, an online news, information, and entertainment company. They also have an English site. Tuan is responsible for bringing the internet to Vietnam in 1995 when he started an "unofficial" internet service - a full two years before the internet was declared legal by the Vietnamese government. After creating this fait accompli he went on to found VASC Software and Media Company, Vietnamnet's state-owned parent company which is also an internet service provider, software company, etc.  Interestingly, he says that Vietnamnet doesn't make money from its PC-based web services. They make most of their money from wireless mobile applications and information services - ring tones, screensavers, information on demand, sports scores and news updates. Vietnamnet has also expanded into cable TV.

Tuan invited me to speak to his staff (average age 29) about my experiences working in Asia as a CNN correspondent, why I left CNN, and my current work on participatory media and weblogs, including the Global Voices project. Most people here haven't heard of blogs. People's mouths were hanging open when I showed them how easy it is for anybody to create a blog for free on services like blogger or blogsome.

Given that Vietnam isn't covered much by the Western media these days, Tuan hopes that Vietnamese bloggers writing in English will be able to help outsiders understand Vietnam better. Tuan is also thinking about starting a Vietnamese language blog-hosting service. He sees blogs as the next step in Vietnam's participatory media evolution.   As I wrote yesterday, Vietnamnet and some other online news sites in this country already have online forums and publish articles written by readers. The next step could be the development of blogging communities attached to news sites, enabling the professional reporters to get a better idea their audience's interests, passions and opinions by reading their blogs.

Given the political situation here, there are lots of un-touchable subjects that we can assume will remain un-touchable. But even a controlled blogosphere would do much to increase public participation in media, and would likely boost responsiveness of professional media to the interests and needs of their audiences. That would certainly be a good thing.

It will be very interesting to see how this all develops.

vietnam

Journalism in Vietnam - more than meets the eye

Here in Vietnam, debates that we’re having back in the U.S. about journalism, media accuracy, corporate consolidaiton, credibility, blogs and citizens’ media all seem pretty remote. But it turns out there’s more going on below the authoritarian surface than you might think.

The Vietnamese media is state-controlled. There are no privately owned newspapers or TV stations. They’re all owned by government or Communist Party-controlled organizations. (Vietnamnet, a new online news service, is one exception, using its status as new media to push the boundaries. I’ll be spending the day with them tomorrow and will write more about them later, but they’re still subject to the same press restrictions as all other news media.) 

Since Vietnam’s Chinese-style economic reforms started, Vietnamese journalists have more leeway than they used to have to cover economic and social issues, but still there are a lot of topics they can’t go near: political dissent, criticism of government leaders, many topics related to religion and treat ment of ethnic minorities, etc. Press coverage of countries like the U.S., Japan and China is tighly controlled to keep that coverage consistent with official government policy.

Into this context come organizations like the World Association of Newspapers, which has been conducting a seminar here in Hanoi this week on newspaper management: how to boost advertising revenue and circulation, how new technologies are changing the media markets around the world, how to be more responsive to your audiences, etc. Of course all these things ultimately come back to fundamental issues of content quality, the nature and purpose of journalism, and questions of what readers actually want to read.

That’s where journalism training comes into the mix. My friend Jessica Smith is here on a program sponsored by the Knight Foundation to help train Vietnamese journalists. Trainers don't deal with larger, more sensitive issues of the relationship between government and media, of course. But they do promote journalistic professionalism by focusing on things like: the importance of things like fact-checking, citing your sources accurately, double-checking facts and figures given to you by official sources, writing compelling headlines and leads. In other words, they’re teaching people how to do stories that are more credible, interesting and readable from the public’s point of view. Apparently, many young journalists here are very responsive to this training and are eager to improve their work because they want their work to be respected by readers and viewers. In a state-run system where journalists are expected to be the government mouthpiece, and whose job survival hasn’t been linked to the readibility of their stories, there hasn’t been much incentive to do good journalism – even within the allowed constraints.

From what I gather from talking to some Vietnamese journalists, they’d like to be part of a more credible and commercially viable press. They want more leeway to do more. So they welcome the training and hope that there will be more of it.

What about grassroots media?  I don’t think we’re going to see blogs emerging as an alternative or opposition press any time soon. It wouldn’t be politically possible for a hard-hitting alternative news blog – like Jeff Ooi’s Screenshots in Malaysia, for instance – to emerge here. There is one Vietnam Journalism blog run by a local journalist as a place for journalists to discuss their profession. It’s categorized as a private site rather than a news site. But he has to be careful about what gets posted there. As for other blogs out of Vietnam, most are written by expats talking about their lives and travels. The most famous is Noodlepie, devoted to food.

On the other hand, Vietnam’s MSM (mainstream media) seems quite open to using participatory media tools to improve their content and strengthen relationships with their audiences. VietnamNet has a section devoted to contributions from readers, along the lines of South Korea’s OhMyNews. Today I met an editor from the country’s most popular newspaper, Tuoi Tre, or “Youth”. He says not only do they have very active reader discussion forums, but they also welcome readers to write articles that get posted online and sometimes even published in the paper. People get paid about $10–20 for stuff that gets used. The editor says that his journalists have gotten a lot of story ideas from readers. They’re also developing a team of editors to collaborate directly with readers/citizen-journalists on investigative stories.

Of course, the investigative reporting can’t go beyond certain limits without people getting into trouble and a reporter was recently jailed for a news scoop exposing corruption. But such teams can at least ensure that the paper’s coverage delves into issues and stories that its readers are most passionate about.

Emerging participatory media in Vietnam. Who wouldathunkit?

vietnam