RConversation

links for 2007-01-31

• Music Awards, Gays, RTHK, and Press Independence - Daai Tou Laam Diary
  "how could you not speculate that the continued struggles at RTHK would further taint the already slanted music awards?"
  (tags: hongkong press freespeech politics)
• China Media Project: Hu's news that just wouldn't go away: the party delivers its message through China's commercialized Web
  The CMP's David Bandurski points out that the story about President Hu Jintao's speech calling for better "management" and "use" of the Internet has been at the top of China's commercical Internet portals all week.
  (tags: China chineseinternetresearch internet propaganda freespeech news journalism)

links for 2007-01-30

• China Media Project: Top officials and Chinese Internet representatives meet to discuss progress on "development of a civilized Web"
  "Top officials and representatives from major Chinese Web portals met yesterday in Beijing to assess progress in the government's Internet clean-up campaign"
  (tags: China chineseinternetresearch internet freespeech censorship)
• Taipei Times - 'Laowai' blog on
  "Despite riling some readers, foreign bloggers are shining a new light on Taiwan:"
  (tags: taiwan internet blogs blogging news journalism)

On becoming an "Edublogger"

Last Friday I was fortunate to sit in on a seminar given by a fellow University of Hong Kong professor Daniel Churchill. He is in the Faculty of Education's Division of I&T Studies and his work focuses specifically on the use of new technologies in education.

Daniel was nominated for an EduBlog Best Teacher Blog award, primarily for his class blog, Interactive Representations of Information and Knowledge.  He said that the student work in that particular class was of unusually high quality. He also said that the same class brought him the best student evaluations in his teaching career at HKU. While it's hard to claim definitive cause and effect with just one class, he's pretty sure there's a strong connection. A class devoted to creating online objects certainly seems compatible with blogging, which also helps. It's possible that some kinds of courses lend themselves to blogging better than others. He said he thought that the fact that students were posting their work publicly and sharing it with each other  easily online probably motivated them to work  harder on their projects. He also pointed out that blogging  helped to generate extra ideas and learning experiences that weren't necessarily planned from the outset, but which greatly enhanced the class. A further description of his presentation and his powerpoint slides - including results of a student survey about the blogging experience - can be downloaded  here. 

An educator in the room asked Daniel about the impact that blogging has had on his own workload. Daniel made an important point: it's not realistic to approach blogging as an add-on on top of all the other things you normally do in your class. Blogging should be part of a complete re-think in terms of how you organize your own work and that of your students. (I was thinking as he replied that we might have a similar response to a question about blogging's impact on the workload of a professional journalist...)

The lecture gave me a lot of good ideas for my own class, New Media Workshop, which naturally has a blog - and for which my students will be blogging among other things. I gave my first lecture this morning and am looking forward to working interactively with some very bright and engaged young people. My class blog is on a Wordpress multiuser "blogfarm" set up for faculty and staff at our Journalism & Media Studies Center, courtesy of Boris Anthony, the Global Voices web guru (thanks Boris!).  Several other faculty are planning to use blogs in their classes as well. We'll all be using them differently, as we're all teaching different things and have very different kinds of assignments. It's going to be fun to see how things evolve, and how the use of blogs impacts the experience of our journalism students.

Oh and by the way, if you think you might be interested in joining our faculty, click here. And if you're interested in applying for our Masters in Journalism program, click here. Deadlines for both are approaching!

links for 2007-01-29

• EastSouthWestNorth: Portrait Of A Chinese Internet Promoter
  "Now that Brother Lang has become an Internet celebrity for being a planner/promoter expert, it has become a professional goal for others to become "Internet promoters." "
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch entertainment culture internet)
• Carnegie-Knight report on news in schools (PDF FILE)
  "The survey of teachers showed that half are making greater use of news today than they were a few years ago... But not all sources of news are doing equally well in the classroom. Internet-based news has supplanted that provided by local newspapers and
  (tags: internet news education journalism)
• China Matters: Why China Hates Satellite Guided Munitions, Part 1: The Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999
  "with the furor over China’s anti-satellite test, which places US GPS and spy satellites at risk, is a good time to recap the Belgrade bombing incident..."
  (tags: china geopolitics military space)

Global journalism, hiring, firing, and the Internet

This post is in reaction primarily to these works:

"Goodbye Gutenberg," Nieman Reports, Winter 2006 Issue 

Jill Caroll, "Foreign News Coverage: The U.S. Media's Undervalued Asset," Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, Working Paper Series, Fall 2006, #D-39 (downloadable as PDF here). (NOTE: Jill's paper has been taken down temporarily from the Shorenstein website due to several errors. I am told that they will put it back up when the errors have been corrected.)

Ethan Zuckerman, "Are foreign correspondents going extinct? Or just changing their stripes?," My Heart's in Accra, Jan 26, 2007.

Michael Hirschorn, "Get Me Rewrite: A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," The Atlantic Monthly, December 2006 issue.

I was making my way through the latest issue of Nieman Reports with its cornucopia of articles about how the Internet is changing journalism - and that the change can be for the good if we make it so - when my friend Ethan Zuckerman wrote a very thoughtful post reacting to Jill Caroll's academic paper defending foreign news coverage.

(Jill as you recall was the freelancer working for the Christian Science Monitor who was held hostage in Iraq - making me pause in a moment of deep respect before venturing to criticize anything she has to say.)

Unfortunately the Boston Globe was not listening to Jill's arguments: that foreign news coverage is highly valued by newspaper readers; it and builds trust, credibility, and uniqueness that can't easily be gained in other ways; and that foreign news is actually good value when you consider these factors. A friend of mine is one of the four remaining Globe correspondents being called home from overseas. It is truly depressing for a person who has spent most of her journalistic career as a foreign correspondent to be faced with a job market in which there are fewer and fewer opportunities.

But are newspapers going to be talked into reversing this epidemic of foreign bureau closures?  Not likely. Unless the entire industry - including individual journalists themselves - start thinking radically outside the box.

Jill offers two suggestions to make foreign correspondence more affordable and justifiable to newspapers:  use more freelancers rather than setting up full-time bureaus with full-time staffs (Jill herself was a freelancer in the Middle East), and do more foreign stories with local angles.

Ethan is surprised that Jill did not address the role of news agencies in any detail. He also points out that she doesn't really deal with the Internet much other than to say that it has hurt circulation and advertising revenues. Ethan's point about the web and foreign news has mainly to do with the potential of citizen media, and how news organizations should be thinking about how to tap the power of thousands of talented and articulate bloggers around the world.

But the challenges and opportunities of the Internet go beyond that - as the many contributors to Goodbye Gutenberg discuss.

Phillip Meyer writes: "It is still possible to save journalism, but maybe not journalism as we know it." One could substitute "foreign correspondence" for "journalism" in that sentence.

As a teacher of journalism in an age where j-schools also need to reinvent themselves to remain relevant, I was particularly struck by the following passage by Roanoke Times editor Michael Riley about how news companies need to rethink themselves:

"No longer are we purely media companies; we must become technology companies, too, and that means we must raise our technology IQ to compete in a digitally transformed world.  A big part of our success will be tied into rethinking what type of people we hire. The premium, moving forward, will rest on attracting more innovators into our midst and finding ways to give them the freedom and the backing they need to experiment and help move us into a new realm in which we can preserve the journalism and make a robust business model work."

If news organizations are going to do a better job at covering international news in original ways and reverse recent trends, people wanting careers covering global stories are going to have to reinvent themselves as much as their employers must.  So must editors who handle international news, if they want to save their own jobs. This is just reality.

Here are a few directions such innovations might take. None of these ideas are mine alone.

- Try harder not to duplicate agency and each other's coverage. In the Internet age when everybody is checking Google and Yahoo for their breaking news anyway (or Reuters and Bloomberg if they work in finance), people are still spending way too much time duplicating stories that the agencies are covering - or that all the other foreign correspondents are covering. Editors have got to allow reporters to break away from the pack and do truly original reporting that readers won't find anywhere else, and which they will come to value and miss if it's absent. Reporters need to push harder to do such stories even when editors are calling up and saying "Reuters [or the NYT, or CNN or whoever] reported xxx can you file something on it?" 

- Focus on global stories that have clear and direct relevance to your core home audience, and make the connection much more clear.  My last three years living back in the U.S. really brought home to me just how unreal the rest of the world seems to most Americans. Sure, there's international news coverage, but even for those who read and watch it, the connection to people's daily lives is not very clear or well understood. This I believe is partially the fault of how news organizations structure their coverage. There is almost no foreign news story that doesn't have a U.S. domestic angle and almost no U.S. domestic story (especially anything economic or business related) that doesn't have international angles to it. Maybe rather than getting rid of foreign news reporters what we really need to eliminate are the separate sections of the newspapers and newscasts that silo foreign news into a category of topics that are distant and strange. The rest of the world is not distant and strange at all. It reaches into your kitchen and your bedroom daily. We need to do a better job of covering the world as the interconnected place it truly is. If we do that properly, I believe having reporters overseas will seem much more indispensable than it does today.

- Create communities of conversation around your reporters. This idea was articulated well by Michael Hirschorn in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He sees one possible future in which star reporters are better off as freelancers:

It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists–like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

The solution he proposes: "Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms." 

In this scenario played out, some readers who are serious Friedman fans would get their New York Times content primarily via Times headline feeds running through Friedman's blog - rather than the Times' front page. There on the blog they would discuss his stories with him and each other, and share recommendations for other journalism by other people.

Under this model, I should think, a news organization has real incentives to support such communities of conversation around its star foreign correspondents, whose talents can be better showcased and who can help be a "draw" for the news organization's other content. If the Christian Science Monitor had Jill Carroll doing exactly that, would more people wind up reading the CSM more faithfully? A certain segment of news junkies like me probably would.

- Involve local immigrant communities and diasporas. This is something that Doug McGill - a former foreign correspondent now in Minnesota - has been going on about for some time: the need for more "glocal" reporting that ties local communities to the broader world. One way to do this is for local newspapers to get a better grip on where the ethnic immigrant communities in their city come from and do a better job at covering those countries, with a special emphasis on stories that span between hometown and homeland. How many U.S. cities with large Ethiopian or Vietnamese populations do a decent job at covering those countries? How well do Hong Kong papers cover the global Hong Kong diaspora? This doesn't necessarily mean opening lots of new bureaus. By utilizing a smart combination of freelancers and readers/viewers who may not be professional journalists but who have stories to tell and things to say that are relevant to your audience, one can bring a great deal more global coverage into the mix - coverage of things that your local community wants and needs to know.

- Engage with citizen media. The Reuters partnership with Global Voices, the BBC's increasingly active engagement with bloggers, and many other initiatives are showing how professional reporting and citizen media can complement each other well. As the Washington Post has found, displaying the blog posts that are linking to your stories helps spread a web of global conversation to your journalism and builds readership and audience loyalty. Then there is a modified OhMyNews model in which editors can work with volunteer citizen-reporters in places where no professional freelancers are available - or on specialized topics they're not qualified to cover.

The web enables all of these things in ways that simply weren't possible before. As Jon Palferman writes: "Given its transformative capacity, we can regard the Web as a problem or we can see it as a potential solution to a broader problem that we would have had to face anyway."

What does all of this mean for young people planning to enter the profession? I think it means that there still are opportunities for young people to go into international news - and for not so young foreign correspondents to re-invent their careers. But we can't expect that things will ever go back to the way they were, or that people ten years from now can have the same careers that some of us had ten years ago (or in some cases even one or two years ago). But if you're not afraid of the web, have an open mind and are ready to innovate, I believe the opportunities will be there - if you help create them.

links for 2007-01-28

• …My heart’s in Accra » Are foreign correspondents going extinct? Or just changing their stripes?
  Ethan Z. reviews a paper by Jill Carrol on the decline of foreign correspondence, and wonders if she's missing a few things - particularly the growing role of wire services and the potential for citizen media as an alternative.
  (tags: journalism news international citizenmedia)
• Jill Carroll: "Foreign News Coverage: U.S. Media's Undervalued Asset"
  This is the link on the Shorenstein Center website where you can download the full text of Jill Carroll's paper.
  (tags: journalism news international)
• Jill Carroll Criticizes Foreign Cutbacks in Harvard Report
  ..."the Christian Science Monitor reporter who spent more than 80 days in captivity in Iraq last year before being freed following an international call for her release, is criticizing cutbacks in foreign news coverage..."
  (tags: news journalism international)
• China's Net users send wrong message | InfoWorld | News | 2007-01-26 | By Steven Schwankert, IDG News Service
  "Who stands to profit from Chinese Internet growth? As usual, the answer is Chinese companies...who can push their customers towards value-added and mobile phone-based fee services."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet business investing mobile wireless)
• China censorship damaged us, Google founders admit | Business | Guardian Unlimited Business
  "Google's decision to censor its search engine in China was bad for the company, its founders admitted yesterday."
  (tags: china censorship google internet search freespeech)
• MySpace set to launch in China | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
  "News Corporation is finalising its plan to launch MySpace in China in a deal that will see it hold less than a 50% stake in the venture, according to a report."
  (tags: myspace newscorp internet china)
• Time China Blog Boycott Called Off Because Coal Matters - China Law Blog: a blog about Chinese law and the legal issues of doing business in China.
  "interspersed with the extreme fluff, there were also a number of really good posts by Simon Elegant and Susan Jakes on journalism in China and on recent events involving China's coal industry. "
  (tags: china blogs journalism)
• Dirty Newsrooms: Wang Keqin's Missing Ending :: China Digital Times (CDT) 中国数字时代
  "acclaimed journalist Wang Keqin has blogged unprinted portions of his probe into the death of reporter Lan Chengzhang."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet blogs journalism humanrights freespeech)

links for 2007-01-27

• FT.com / In depth - Google links hitches in China to local rivals
  "China’s efforts to “purify” the internet by cracking down on websites such as Google may be as much driven by protectionism as ideology, the founders of the US search engine said on Friday."
  (tags: china internet chineseinternetresearch censorship freespeech google search)

links for 2007-01-26

• Real Scoop On Fraud Journos: Q&A W/ Wang Keqin :: China Digital Times (CDT) 中国数字时代
  Jonathan Ansfield interviews Wang Keqin on the murky situation surrounding the beating death of a journalist. He writes that for China's coal mining biz, "all too often it doesn’t pay to play it clean. Sadly, the same can be said for journalism on the s
  (tags: journalism china media news freespeech)
• Gen Kanai weblog: the cost of monoculture
  Gen rips apart the myth of Korea being a cyber-utopia....
  (tags: SKorea internet techtrends computing wireless)

links for 2007-01-25

• China's Hu Vows to "Purify" Internet - News and Analysis by PC Magazine
  Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population."
  (tags: china chineseinternetresearch internet censorship propaganda freespeech politics)

links for 2007-01-24

• EastSouthWestNorth: A Question of Press Impartiality in Hong Kong
  Roland Soong takes a look at local press coverage of government interference in a program produced by RTHK, a government-funded station. He writes: "The interest in this blog post is a meta-question about whether the print press covered this issue in an i
  (tags: hongkong news journalism media newspapers objectivity)
• EastSouthWestNorth: Daily Brief Comments January 2007
  Roland Soong on the RTHK incident: " The reality is this: there is no significant blog/forum force out there defending the position of the Broadcasting Authority. Think about the implications ..."
  (tags: hongkong media internet blogs journalism news)
• China Mobile subscribers top U.S. population | InfoWorld | News | 2007-01-22 | By Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service
  "There are more mobile phone subscribers at one Chinese operator than people in the entire U.S., according to figures China Mobile posted on its Web site late Friday."
  (tags: china mobile wireless)
• PC Pro: News: China promises to become world's largest Net user
  "China is set to become the world's largest Net user within two years, outsurfing the US."
  (tags: china internet chineseinternetresearch)
• BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | China net use may soon surpass US
  "China had 137m internet users by the end of 2006, an increase of 23% from the year before, the centre reported. This figure means that more than 10% of the population is now online."
  (tags: internet china chineseinternetresearch)
• Podcast Pioneers — Antiwave
  "This episode of Danwei TV's Hard Hat Show is an interview with Flypig and Ping Ke, the two Chinese bloggers who make the excellent Antiwave podcast."
  (tags: podcasting china chineseinternetresearch video internet)